


Artificial Lifeform 01 (Control) (Who prefers 'Owen')

by chocographs



Category: Dissidia Duodecim: Final Fantasy, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy I
Genre: (but not a fun one), Alternate Universe, Gen, WoL gets to have a childhood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-06-05 18:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 42,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15177131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocographs/pseuds/chocographs
Summary: Before Cosmos and Chaos were what we know them as now, they were a mother and child in Onrac at the heart of a war. Cid of the Lufaine was once a man, and the Warrior of Light had a name (even if nobody else felt like calling him by it).(Alternate universe in which the plot of Final Fantasy I happens at the same time as Cosmos and Chaos' backstory.)





	1. Garland

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pudgy puk (deumion)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deumion/gifts).



Study 15 of effects of human skin cells upon crystal ore.

  * Samples: 12 (Low sample numbers used for safety reasons – encouraging growth of large amounts of crystal ore currently considered hazardous.)
  * Addition of human skin cells to cultured crystal ore samples produces expected results. Samples 1-6 grow at faster than expected speed, appear to be forming human tissue.
  * Samples 1, 2 and 5: form substance which appears to be human skin tissue.
  * Sample 3: failed to develop.
  * Sample 4: Grew from crystal sample into what appeared to be foetal heart. Currently identical in most ways to a child’s heart (see attached diagrams for comparisons of dissected crystal ore heart from previous study and human heart), requires further examination.
  * Sample 6: Hairline crack discovered in container. Sample formed briefly into foetal stomach before growing outside of container. Immediately moved to incinerator, where sample appears to have hardened into inanimate crystal.



Control Samples 7-12 grow at expected speed in similar conditions before hardening into inanimate crystal. No other notable results.

 

* * *

 

Crystal ore deemed unsuitable for use in civilian medicine. Permission granted to study potential military use. Human test subjects granted. Please see attached warnings and make available to all employees.

 

* * *

 

Subjects are to remain under effects of sleep spells at all times. Consciousness approved for testing purposes – minimum of four armed security staff required at all times when testing.

FOR ATTENTION OF ALL STAFF: Test subjects are to be treated with utmost caution. These men and women are violent criminals, guilty of grave crimes against Onrac. This role has been granted to them in place of a death sentence. They may yet prove ungrateful if given the opportunity.

Refer to them only by designation number. Interact only when necessary. Report any suspicious behavior or requests from staff working closely with test subjects at once.

Violations will result in immediate dismissal.

 

* * *

 

 

Study 4 of effects of damage upon crystal ore skin grafts.

  * Subject 1: Male, Cornelian. Estimated age – 47. Crystal skin grafts on left arm.
  * Subject 2: Female, Pravokan. Estimated age – 39. Crystal skin grafts on ribs.



Method: Study the results of crushing, non-magical burning and piercing damage upon both control ‘normal’ skin and crystal ore skin grafts. Trained white mages on hand to repair damage before complications can arise. Subjects need not be conscious for this study.

  * Skin grafts in both subjects highly resistant to crushing damage. Severe bruising and minor damage to bone on control area, with only mild bruising on crystal area. Further investigation reveals significantly reduced damage to blood vessels beneath skin.
  * Only minor differences in resistance to piercing by surgical instruments. When cut with a scalpel, crystal ore grafts provide negligible amounts of resistance compared to control area. Crystal skin appears more resistant to cutting by non-surgical instruments. Suspected to be due to skin’s resistance to pressure and requirement of higher pressure to cut with a blunter instrument.
  * Skin grafts in both subjects react to burning damage by becoming visibly crystalline when heated. At temperatures that caused severe burns on control area, grafts became significantly less flexible. Some ‘blistering’ occurred, with crystal grafts losing shape temporarily. When cooled, grafts retained crystalline appearance for approximately 40 mins before returning to appearance and texture of human skin. Upon cooling, grafted skin appeared cracked. Expected to heal normally. Internal burning damage significantly reduced by this process. Further testing required with higher temperatures.



(Notes: After 10 days, crystal skin grafts have healed completely.)

 

* * *

 

**Incident report.**

Involved parties

  * Dr. W*: Male, Onrac native. 38.
  * Subject 9: Male, Onrac native. 29.


  * Staff member Dr. W* released Subject 9. No reason given at present. Dr. W* safely confined, awaiting trial for treason back in Onrac.
  * Subject 9 had been used to study the effects of a series of crystal ore organs upon the human body, most recently being the first successful recipient of crystal ore brain tissue. As this had been expected to cause immense aggression, Subject 9 was kept under high security.
  * However, during his brief period of consciousness and freedom, Subject 9 displayed neither aggression nor any sort of will of its own. After initial capture, Subject 9 was confirmed to retain knowledge from prior to brain tissue transfer, but had ceased to be capable of acting of own will. Subject 9 proved to be capable of following instructions, both from Dr. W* and from facility staff. Subject seemed to be unable to differentiate between instruction givers, and if given conflicting orders would fail to follow either.
  * Subject 9 deemed potentially hazardous due to incident despite nonaggression and has been destroyed.



 

* * *

 

Permission granted to create life form from crystal ore.

_(Thank god. Hated working with the human subjects. Didn’t go to school to hurt people, not even criminals.)_

 

* * *

 

Study of cognitive capacities of crystal life form.

  * Subject 1: Crystalline life form. Age – 2 mo.


  * Over 2 months, life form has gained significant knowledge both from teaching and from instruction to educate itself. Life form’s ability to apply this knowledge is significantly better than expected – around average for a 12 year old human after 2 months of learning. However despite extensive coaxing life form cannot act outside of exact instructions.
  * Use for military purposes inadvisable at present stage. Some ability to think for self required in order to function properly, as current life form is unable to differentiate between those it ought and ought not follow instructions from. Danger of weapon following enemy’s instructions cannot be ignored.



_(Dr. Cid suggests that the crystal life forms could develop a sense of self at the same rate as a human if raised in the same manner. Higher ups don’t like it. Can hear them now, ‘This project has already taken a decade, we do not have time to play house on the off chance that we raise a soldier.’)_

 

* * *

 

Mortality weighed heavy on Garland’s mind these days. As Queen Jayne grew larger and brighter with child, it was hard to keep his thoughts from passing from the bright new life within her to Cornelia’s future. To Cornelia’s future without him.

Princess Jayne had only seen five summers when he had entered the royal family’s service as a man of twenty, the youngest knight ever to know such an honour. Round face rounder with baby fat and smiles and framed by soft, short rose-coloured ringlets, new dress already too tight in some places and too big in others only a week after she’d received it, she had stared up at him as the buzz of excited adults went over her head. He had kneeled before her and even with his head bowed she had been a little short of eye level with the top of it. Confused about what was expected of her, she had placed a tiny hand upon his head and patted it awkwardly. Later, he’d seen her react the same way to a new guard dog. He could see it even now, for he had truly laughed few enough times in his lifetime that he could remember them all distinctly and vividly. He was not so presumptuous as to consider himself a brother to her, of course. But he had fallen in love then in the way a man only does when he finally finds family and in living memory no other knight of Cornelia had ever been called upon to speak at the wedding of the crown princess. At her side, silent and powerless, he had stood as she wept for her mother and he had placed the crown upon her trembling head in the days afterward. And now here she was – seven months, the doctors said – all full of a child of her own.

They were both still young, of course, Jayne only a little way into her third decade and he nearing the end of his fourth. And yet-

They were not at war, not at present, but the clouds of it grew heavy on the horizon, filling the court with whispers and making his hands itch whenever they were not upon the handle of a blade. Times had been hard since before he was a tiny, angry, hungry little beast of a boy on the streets of Cornelia. Harvests failed and the people went hungry. The seas churned and fishing vessels were lost. Summer brought droughts and wildfires – cost food and land and men – and for as long as he had been able to work it had been men, and not the wind, that turned the mills and ground what grain there was into flour for bread. And with difficult times came conflicts. Garland had known many in his life, and he knew the strengths of those he had faced. Pravoka’s navy was unmatched, one of the few forces to best him (for he was a man, and not a boat, and they did not have the decency to face him on the land). The terms of peace with them had forced the destruction of the great bridge, so that Cornelia could never move troops to the mainland without going over water – without their say. He had fought alongside the elves, never against them, but he trusted the fair people as far as the length of his blade and no further and he knew full well that the elves spoke the tongues of beasts and could call great spirits – eidolons - from the worlds beyond this one. The subterranean lands of the dwarves had never been mapped and had seemed to him to be only a great blackness that absorbed the light of any torch, and rumour claimed that the entire place was fortified as only the castles of the other nations were. Lufenia was a collection of villages and not a great nation but it boasted massive golems of steel and lightning that moved only at their masters’ commands. Onrac’s brief push into Lufenian lands seemed to have halted, for the moment, but no Cornelian spy sent there returned uncompromised. The battles that had occurred had been bloody and terrible and had more than proven its might, but he knew not how they had been won and that haunted him more than anything.

And Cornelia – Cornelia had its knight. In times of old, it had always found heroes. Today, it had Garland, the equal of any of these foes, but only a man. A man who could only grow in strength so much more. A man who could die at any moment, who could be laid low by so much as a moment of misfortune whether it took the shape of a stray arrow or a winter sickness, who could not be repaired like the great machines of Lufenia or passed down like the secrets of Elfheim or built anew and greater like the ships of Pravoka. A man who, even if he could live to protect Jayne until her death, would never live long enough to protect her unborn child.

There were other soldiers, of course. Cornelia had a military, but a hundred of them could never be half his equal. They could not move without Pravoka’s say, and Cornelia’s uneasy treaty with Onrac – formed in haste after the latter’s brief attack on Lufenia caused rumours that they bore notions of forming an empire – kept them from expanding it quickly. He was all that stood between Cornelia and any for that might take her, and he could not do so forever. If there was any one thing that he loved more dearly than he did the Queen he had seen grow from child to sovereign it was her country.

And one day, because he was a man and not a god, he was doomed to fail them both.

A small hand fell upon his back, bringing his thoughts back to the present. Here, he was alive, and would be for at least a few decades longer if he kept his wits about him, and the castle was full of cautious joy and fretting doctors. Even in the hardest months the kingdom was full of warmth, as if the thing in the queen’s womb were a bonfire and not just another hungry mouth. The baby would arrive with the spring, the doctors and mages had said, and Garland trusted in prophecy and omen – this was an auspicious sign. He looked down at the woman he would never call his sister, nor his closest friend, and only occasionally his charge, expression hidden behind the metal face plate of a heavy helmet.

“Oh, do take that thing off. I swear, I have not seen your face in days, and you hardly need it for reading.” Jayne said softly. Up close, she was less glowing with life and more plain flushed, enjoying the later months of pregnancy somewhat less than the joy around that castle might have suggested. She glanced over the papers upon his desk – a selection of documents that their spies had managed to send back from Onrac before they had been confirmed to be compromised, useful but untrustworthy – and her face hardened. If false, their spies had been sending bad information for years now. If true-

-Even Garland did not find his stomach strong enough to consider that. Not yet. He drew the papers away from the queen’s gaze. Best not let such terrible matters into her mind, not while she was carrying child. Her eyes followed them briefly and she sighed before forcing her mouth into something smile-like.

“We all will forget what you look like if you keep it on any longer, and I would not be able to keep from laughing if I heard one whisper that there might be anything handsome under there.”

Jayne was a small woman – taller, it seemed, when she spoke as a queen, but she rarely did so when speaking with Garland. She had always been a little plump, even before the pregnancy, with bright rosy cheeks that hadn’t faded since she was a five year old nervously petting the head of the newest royal guard for want of something more appropriate to do and the sort of face that naturally seemed to want to smile even in times like these. Without her powders (‘bad for the child’, the doctors had said) there was a great deal of rose on her nose and forehead, as well.

He did not remove the face plate and as he opened his mouth to make an excuse for it, Queen Jayne sighed and interrupted.

“I shall order it, one of these days. Just you see.”

The silence that followed was easy, the sort that came from eighteen years close as family. Servants hovered nervously around as the Queen and her knight moved through the halls of the castle, as he helped her lower herself into a chair to take tea, standing at her side. He was not needed here – not really. There was little danger in the drawing room. But it was the servants that Jayne dismissed, and not him, and he had known the young queen long enough to know when she wished to speak to her not-brother and not to her knight.

“A girl. According to the mages.” She said, once the room held only two sets of ears. “If they are right-” Her hand moved to her stomach as she paused, placing the teacup down. “Sarah, I think.”

“For your grandmother.” Garland was too young to have known the late Queen Sarah II as monarch, long as her reign had been. He had met her as queen mother a few times in the early years of his time in the royal family’s service, but by then she had been approaching her hundredth year and near lost to illness. Jayne nodded. “A good name. And a good omen, I hope.”

The reign of Sarah II – Sarah the Blessed - had been peaceful and prosperous. No harvest had failed while the crown sat upon her head. Armies had marched upon Cornelia and simply turned away at its borders. Not so much as a single fishing boat had sunk, and the summers and winters had been mild as lambs. If the name would carry with it even a fraction of the good fortune that had come to Cornelia under her rule, perhaps the future would be bright even without him.

Another silence followed, Garland sinking back into his thoughts of the future – Cornelia had survived without him before. Perhaps, with the guidance of a strong ruler, it might survive again. Jayne’s hands did not return to the teacup and she carefully tested words in her moth until they formed a shape that she liked.

“It is improper-” She murmured something under her breath, there. Something about how neither she nor her husband had siblings of their own. About accepted procedure. About the members of her court, and what they might think.

“Then, whatever it is, I shall forget that you have ordered it when it is done.”

Jayne laughed at that, then shook her head. But the way she sat changed, only slightly. Her smile set into something harder, something more queenlike. Garland knew that face – she had worn it when she had sent him to war. He was ready.

“It will not be done for some time. Garland, I wish for more than a good omen. I wish for her to be safe. For- for you to be her godfather.”

Garland very suddenly needed to sit.

He did not do so. None of the chairs in the drawing room would stand the weight of his armour, and so he let himself fall forward onto his knees until the room became still again. When it did, when he looked up, his eyes were level with Jayne’s swollen abdomen. It was so small, really, despite seeming so large in comparison to the queen’s small frame. Carefully, he removed his helmet to see better, setting it on the floor of the drawing room. Jayne game a small smirk of victory at that, but said nothing as he stared so intently that one might have been forgiven for thinking he’d gone the last seven months without suspecting that his queen was with child.

“She will be safe.” His voice, steady in the face of terrible dangers, shook when he spoke.

His mind no longer found itself occupied with Cornelia’s future without him. Cornelia would not know a future without him. The new princess would not know a world in which he could not protect her. She would be safe, and Jayne would be safe, and Cornelia would be safe, and he there between all of them and whatever harm loomed ahead for as long as it took. Whatever he had to do to achieve it. Whatever he had to become.


	2. Owen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The main character shows up, one chapter late. Unei as the name for Cid's wife is non-canon, but I needed a name for her because I can't just call her Cid's wife all the time.

Artificial Lifeform 01 (Control), who preferred 'Owen', had first learned his name when he was, according to the papers he went through each week to report illness or injury, 78 months old. He wasn’t entirely sure this was right, because he counted everything carefully and he couldn’t recall having existed for 78 months, but the paper had a lot of things wrong with it in his opinion (his preferred diet was not so and so grams of protein, so and so grams of fat, those weren’t even foods) and nobody ever seemed to listen when he told them that.

“Oh-one.” He said, softly as always but determined, pointing to the ‘01’ on the sign of his door. “Owen.”

He was very pleased with himself for coming up with that. A few months ago, he’d come to understand that his family had names that were not ‘Doctor’. The man he was speaking to, for example, was called Henry. Since then, he’d come to several conclusions.

1 – When adults called each other by ‘Doctor’, that meant that things were serious. Those were the times when he had to do tests, or when they came in and out of meetings or discussed the non-control subject.

2 – When adults called each other by their secret names, they laughed and joked. Sometimes they drank together or played games or just sat and talked about things that he’d never seen in the facility.

3 – He had only ever been called by ‘Control’, and none of the people who called him that ever laughed and joked while they did so. And so ‘Control’ must be his important name, for important business.

4 – He would quite like to try being laughed and joked with. It seemed pleasant.

And thus.

5 – He surely must have a secret name of his own, as the adults did. And it had taken him a little while to discover what it might be (the adults said that problem solving skills seemed to be developing far slower than pure capacity for knowledge, but he was trying as hard as he could). But now he knew, because it had been written on his door the whole time.

“It’s pronounced zero-one.” The doctor (Henry) corrected. “’Oh’ is the letter.”

Artificial Lifeform 01 (Control) (Owen) blinked at him. That was ridiculous. Zero-one didn’t sound like a name at all. But he didn’t talk back because he’d gone four whole months without a demerit, which was the longest he could remember. He just quietly decided that he must be right anyway. He did this fairly frequently, because he wasn’t allowed to say that an adult might be wrong but nobody could stop him from thinking so. He could think whatever he pleased and nobody could give him any demerits at all for it. It was the one little bit of defiance he could indulge in, and he enjoyed it very much.

Owen was very good at problem solving, really. The adults just didn’t realise which problems they were giving him to solve.

He didn’t know if he wanted them to figure that out or not - he would quite like someone to recognise that he was very clever and that he knew things like his own name and the things he liked to eat and didn’t care for having them decided for him. But then if they knew, and if they wrote it down like they did everything else, then it wouldn’t be his any more. It wouldn’t be special. And when they knew and didn’t write it down, when they just decided they were right and he was wrong-

-He didn’t know why that hurt, but he knew it did, deep inside him and more sharply than it had hurt when he had broken a rib in the last physical test.

“Doctor Henry.”

The voice was soft, much moreso than its owner. Unei rarely came to this part of the facility. She usually stayed in the living quarters except when accompanying Chaos to his various tests. She was taller than all but one or two of the men at the facility, dwarfing her husband, with long golden hair. Owen had learned that all lufenians had golden hair like hers, that they dyed it to resemble their goddess of harmony. She wore long dresses that drew across the floor behind her and moved so steadily that with the skirts hiding her feet it looked like she was gliding across the ground. The doctor immediately turned his head as if she had barked an order, though her voice was no louder than the movement of a book’s pages.

“My husband requires your presence. Chaos-” And her face twisted with distaste at that name. “-Chaos’ field test has been moved forward. We intend to start at sunset.”

“At- Sunset?” Disbelief shot over the doctor’s face, though Owen couldn’t understand how anyone could fail to believe Unei. “We had a month yet! There is still so much-”

“-Omega has been sighted, Doctor.” The name meant nothing to Owen, but the way that Unei’s lips pressed together and her voice became heavier told him that perhaps it should. “We initiate the test at sunset. If he is successful, he returns at dawn. A day’s rest and maintenance, and then we face him. If not, we evacuate.”

At that, the doctor simply nodded and straightened himself, turning to Owen. “Control, today’s lessons will be replaced with self-directed study and training.”

“ _Owen._ ”

But the doctor didn’t respond, and Owen was left staring at his back as he walked away. Angry and embarrassed at being ignored, he didn’t even notice Unei coming to crouch next to him until she was there at eye level.

“Owen.” She said, and she didn’t sound like the other people here. He felt very small and very foolish for getting upset about something as silly as a name, suddenly. Unei smiled, looking up at the sign on the door of his room. “Like the number on your sign, yes? Oh-one.”

He just nodded, cheeks growing red, not quite able to speak. She was going to tell him that it was silly, and it was going to hurt terribly because he liked her best of all the adults here. Unei was the only one who argued for him when they gave him tests that were too hard and who slipped story books into his studying materials, and now she was going to tell him that he was silly and childish and that all that effort had been wasted.

“It’s a lovely name.” Her voice was softer still now, so that he cold barely hear her. “You oughtn’t tell it to everyone, though. They think your name is something else, and they get very upset if they find out that they are wrong. Do know know how to keep a secret?”

He shook his head this time. “I’m not supposed to start inter- interri-” He knew how to say this word. He had to prove he knew how. “-Interrogation training. Not for five months.”

Unei looked horrified at that, and shame began to swallow him. Had Chaos already finished his interrogation training? Was he so far behind? She gritted her teeth and then very suddenly pulled Owen close to her in what he understood to be an embrace of some sort. Then she whispered in his ear.

“Don’t tell anyone who isn’t important. That’s all you need to do.” His cheeks and ears were bright red by now. He nodded, murmuring about understanding, and Unei pulled him tighter for just a moment. “Chaos has a secret name at well.”

And then he was freed, standing alone and unsteady as Unei pulled herself to her full, immense height and walked away as if she had said nothing.

 

* * *

 

“Omega. What do you know of him?”

Once, this building – the Onrac Royal Weapons Development Facility - had been called the Citadel of Trials. In that time it had been Lufenian land, as the Cardia Islands themselves had been. But times changed, and Onrac’s reach had expanded. While most of the hawk-shaped island remained under Lufenian rule, as far as such existed, its left wing was firmly under Onrac’s command. Once taken, it would have taken a miracle to reclaim it. The facility was surrounded on all sides by great mountain ranges. Armies on foot or horseback would be forced onto the narrow roads, where a few men could hold an army off. Onrac had taken this land by sea, and no navy save for Pravoka’s – half a world away, with few concerns for the affairs of others if there wasn’t coin in it - could stand against them on the ocean. Before Onrac came it had been, Director Cid recalled, a place where children went to become men and women. He had passed the tests before any other boys his age, racing out of the building with bruised ribs and filthy, skinned knees and a rat’s tail grasped firmly in one hand, and earned the memories and knowledge of their village’s most brilliant mind.

His people – an unusual little village even by Lufenian standards – had been taught the art of memory transferral by the dragons themselves. He’d thought it sounded silly as a child but now, carrying some twenty something generations worth of knowledge going all the way back to the village’s founder, he knew it to be fact. He remembered it as clearly as if he had been there. He remembered a lot of things. And whoever came after him would remember more. It kept him calm, knowing that. Even here, forced to work for the people who had taken so much from his people, he had to maintain his composure. Whatever he did would be judged by whoever followed him, whoever followed them, and on into the future.

He was being watched in every moment, not by the Security Personnel who treated him with dignity but never put down their blades around him, but by his successors. They would judge him, but worse, they would learn from him. And that, more than men with guns, kept him compliant.

“As much as I knew of WarMech, when you asked me last. Nothing.” It did not always keep him honest. “Both were developed long before I was born, you understand. I have never laid eyes on the thing.”

That detail was true. Inconsequential, as his own lifetime and his own eyes had little bearing on what he knew, but true. The man across from him nodded, stone-faced, and wrote something down. Now more than ever, it was painfully clear that even as director he was as much a prisoner as the test subjects had been back when they were used. He was treated with respect, certainly, but he was trapped. And if the man in front of him didn’t believe him, then they would be deciding whether his mind was valuable enough to not put a bullet in it. He watched carefully, debating the merits of revealing what he knew – it would hardly change anything, Unei already knew everything he did and would be facing Omega at Chaos’ side. But until now, his captors didn’t seem to understand the way the memories of his people worked, how they were passed between lifetimes. They knew that he worked with memory, but thought of it as an intellectual pursuit. That knowledge was more vital to keep from them than anything of Omega.

“Are you certain there is nothing more than you can give us, Director? We only wish to ensure your wife’s safety.”

“Nothing.”

 

* * *

 

Owen was never quite certain if he enjoyed self-directed study. He always liked it well enough in theory – thoughts of all of the fascinating books he had waiting in the study ran through his head, or maybe the picture books that Unei snuck in there. Perhaps the puzzles he liked to work through, the ones he knew that they used to test him but that he enjoyed anyway. In practice it was different. In practice being left without instruction left him anxious, he never knew if he was choosing the right thing to do. Would anyone be angry with him for choosing to study from the books he preferred? Would he be scolded if he read over training? Would he be tested on what he had done, and would he fail?

So, while he didn’t feel like he minded being left on his own all that much, he was glad when Doctor Henry returned. He pushed his chair in under the desk and moved dutifully over, ready to recite all of the work he had done in the hope that it would be enough. The doctor simply sighed, shaking his head, and Owen felt a lump in his throat. Had he failed so badly that it could be sensed at a glance? That couldn’t be true, could it?

“Doctor, I worked on-”

“-it’s sufficient, I am sure. Collect your medicines to take with supper, you have the evening to yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Self-directed study again, tomorrow. Do you need someone in the morning, for your injections?”

“I can do them.”

“Good. I’ll have someone leave them at your desk.”

And with that he was gone, leaving Owen trying to figure out if he had done something wrong. Unei had said that there was a lot of work to be done, he tried to tell himself to quiet the tight feeling building in his chest. He must be tired. Perhaps Chaos had been difficult – he always heard how difficult Chaos was, and how good he was, and how that was why they liked him better.

Owen’s permissions allowed him to access the northern part of the facility. He had three rooms of his own. The bedroom and washroom he was allowed to keep private as long as he behaved. The study which connected them both to the corridor was also his own, but people were allowed to come and go from it to leave him meals and work and medicine. He lived on the ground floor because sometimes the tests meant that he couldn’t move his own body and it was difficult to move a stretcher up and down stairs. Because he hadn’t had a demerit in so long, he was also allowed to go out through the big doors into the courtyard outside, or up into the unused parts of the building in the north east tower as long as he was back in his quarters by the time the bell struck nine (it should have been eight, but the extra hour was another privilege for good behaviour. Chaos’ curfew was eight, he was certain).

Here on the ground floor, there were four more doors on this corridor. The one opposite his had apparently been meant to be Chaos’ quarters once. He had never been inside, but he supposed it must be much the same as his own. Chaos didn’t stay there, though. Chaos needed ‘constant supervision’, which meant that he lived in the scientists’ living quarters with Director Cid and Unei, off on the western side. Owen had never been there, and he wasn’t sure he liked the concept of ‘constant supervision’ any more than he liked being left alone all the time, but he thought he might like to live with Cid and Unei. She probably had those picture books that she snuck into his study all over her home. Chaos probably could read them any time he wanted. The door next to his was the observation room, where he went if he was hurt or sick. Chaos went there as well, sometimes. The room next to Chaos’ empty quarters was fascinating to him, but off limits. Through the crack below the door he could see a workbench and tools. When he was older, he knew, he was going to have to learn to take care of the weapons and armour that he was only practicing with now. That was, he suspected, what the workroom would be used for eventually, and he was impatient to be allowed into it.

The furthest north he had gone was the northeast tower. The furthest south had been the far end of the courtyard. There were ten scientists living here, and he had figured out the secret names of four of them. There were fifteen assistants, if you counted the ones who made the machines work. There were four cleaners, two kitchen staff, usually twenty guards but sometimes more. There were official-looking people who came and went along with their entourages. There were delivery people who sometimes needed to stay for a while until the sea calmed. Then there were Unei and Chaos. That was all the people in the world.

And there was Omega, he reminded himself, whoever Omega was.


	3. Unei

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up in case any reader is squeamish about it - injections and blood drawing happen in this one. Not described in detail, though!

“You did well.” Unei sighed, pulling her charge to her chest. He was still hot to the touch from his transformation, but not unbearably so. Perhaps she would have still held him close if he hadn’t cooled – she liked to think that she was brave enough. “You did so, so well.”

Artificial Lifeform 01 (Test) (known some time ago as Subject 1: Crystalline Lifeform) was not what someone might call an easy child to love. For all sorts of reasons, the least of which being that calling him a ‘child’ was absolutely, completely forbidden.

(And yet she did it anyway. She did a lot of things anyway. Always had. Of the two of them, her and Cid, in all of their lives she had always been the one who did things anyway. Cid was clever and found ways around danger. She was clever, too, clever enough to know that allowing injustice to stand was never a solution to a problem.)

It (he) was not a beautiful child. He had come together into something that for all purposes looked human enough with the details not quite right. His skin was too pale and covered with raised circular scars that shimmered in the light like soap bubbles. It turned hard and crystalline the moment pressure was applied to it. His hair was white and thin and patchy. It broke easily and he would tear it out in handfuls during his fits. His eyes were a little too far apart, a little too large. He was smaller than he ought to be, and no matter how much he ate (and goodness, he did eat a lot. Usually food prepared for him, but they’d caught him with rats once or twice now and she had had to scold him a few months ago for snatching a finch’s chicks from their nest) he looked as if his bones might burst through his paper-thin skin. Tiny, dark, bony horns poked out of his temples ever since the last addition to his memory.

There had been too much stuffed into his head. Both Cid and Unei had many generations worth of wisdom passed down to them but those were generations, lived once at a time. Their son (and they would be dead, should anyone hear them call him that. She did so nonetheless) had had forced upon him the memories of a dozen people at once. A dozen terrified prisoners, captured and kept as subjects and then discarded. More, after that, whatever monsters they could find to hand. A behemoth’s mind had been the latest to find itself part of him, and the month after that had been a sleepless one for all between the nightmares and the pains of the horns coming in. It was little wonder that he started at every shadow. A jumpy child would have been difficult under the best of circumstances, but he was strong. Impossibly strong, with a grip that could bend steel and a grasp of spellcraft that put both Unei and her husband’s sagely ancestors to shame and the rugs and chairs of their living quarters to the torch at something so startling as an unexpected noise.

The staff had called him Chaos, for that. He had been ‘Test’ before that and ‘Subject 1’ in the months before Control (Owen, she reminded herself sharply) had been approved and created. It was a cruel nickname, she thought. Mocking. It was hardly his fault that he jumped at shadows, that the mess of people and monsters inside him left him so difficult and unpredictable. They had set out to make something terrible and succeeded, and it was not right that they lay the blame for that success at the feet of their results.

He was not what one might call an easy child to love. But Unei, as was her way, did so anyway.

“Mmm.” The noise was quiet, and Unei turned her attention to her son. She’d thought him asleep, worn out from exertion. He blinked up at her before closing his eyes and burying his head in her chest sleepily. His voice was muffled now, but no other sound mattered enough to hear over him. “Passed? I passed?”

Her heart sank at that. They stood in the shadow of a great WarMech, damaged terribly and non-functional. He had passed, without a doubt. This would not have been easier, had he failed, but the difficult part would have come sooner and been done with. Omega would have forced the evacuation of the facility. Notes could be burned in the upheaval, the support system for the tracking device under her skin ‘broken’. She and Cid and Chaos and the other boy could vanish and perhaps – if they had been lucky - there needn’t have been any bloodshed at all. Perhaps it would not have gone like that. Perhaps Chaos would have been sent to the incinerator upon his failure. Perhaps her and her husband would have been sent with him, their long memories lost for good. But she had hoped. She had been willing to risk.

She kissed his head.

“Mid, you were wonderful.”

Things were more complicated now. Now, if she was to keep her son safe, she had to win a war for her enemy.

 

* * *

 

‘He returns at dawn’, she had said. They had not even been done with the test at dawn, in truth, and it was dark by the time the chocobo bore them back. Had she been alone with Chaos, it would have been far quicker. With the guards accompanying her Chaos was jumpy. She couldn’t use her magics to speed their travel – their captors still thought her a pretty trophy of Cid’s useful only for keeping their new weapon under control and she had no intention of letting them believe otherwise. It was slower and more tiring, this way. It had been a little over a full day since they left, and the temptation to simply not return had proven only slightly less powerful than her exhaustion and unwillingness to make an enemy of the soldiers who rode ahead of her. Every now and then one of them would tell her that Chaos ought to ride on his own and after some persuasion he would sleepily crawl out from her arms and onto the back of his own bird. And then the bird would make a noise or move oddly and he would start and spook the chocobos with his panic, and then the scared chocobos would alarm him more and she would sit calmly upon her own bird and suggest that she be allowed to hold him again. After the third time his chocobo had bolted. He would be distressed about that later – he did like the bird – but for now Unei was only too glad to see the back of the thing and have the matter forced.

The other boy, Owen, was watching them when they arrived. Breaking curfew, she noted without much disapproval at all, because by now it must have been close to midnight. She wondered if anyone else had seen him staring down from the darkened window of one of the rooms above them (or had rather seen his hair as she had, bright white and practically glowing even in the weak moonlight, worn long ever since he was given the choice for himself. He’d come up with a clumsy pragmatic justification for the choice which had only made it more clear that he simply wasn’t comfortable having people hovering about his head with blades). If they had, nobody else seemed to be looking. She gave what she hoped was a motion of acknowledgement, looking up at him for only the briefest of moments, before setting about ignoring him. Best not to get the boy in trouble.

Cid was the first to greet them properly, looking like he had slept about as much as she had over the last few days. He took her hand, supporting her weight as she lowered herself and Chaos down from the bird and found her unsteady feet. Chaos said nothing. He had shouted ‘Papa!’ to Cid once, years ago, and it had been a miracle they’d been able to explain it away. Since then, he didn’t speak to her husband outside of the privacy of their living quarters unless he was forced to.

“As you can see,” Unei nudged Chaos forward to display him to Cid and his colleagues, making only token efforts to stifle a yawn. “He sustained no damage in the battle. The abandoned WarMech will need repairs before it can be used for training again.”

“After Omega. Until he is done with, any talk of future work is hypothetical.”

Cid’s face was difficult to read, even with so many lifetimes’ experience of it. Unei suspected, though, that he felt as she did. Terrified and exhausted. Gladder than anything that their son had succeeded and yet burning with rage at the indignity heaped upon the WarMech, one of Lufenia’s great soldiers of steel. Horrified by the possibility of Omega’s victory. Horrified by the possibility of what Omega being bested could mean. She looked up quickly. Owen was gone from the window and hopefully already back in his room without being caught.

“I am tired.” She announced, before she could think too much on Omega. She had already done more thinking than she wished to today. “Prepare a cot in the observation room so I can rest close to Chaos as you examine him.”

 

* * *

 

 

She woke in her own bed – Cid must have had her moved here when they were done. The songs of her birds, so sweet on their own, merged into a cacophonous scream for attention. She had, it seemed, been missed.

Chaos sat at the foot of her bed, still in his hospital gown, and she laughed. Perhaps one day his life would be normal enough that she would have to explain to him that going around with only one’s front covered was not generally considered proper. Until then, he could dress as he pleased. He rocked back and fourth gently, watching the birds as they made a fuss. He loved her birds very much, so much that he had cried when she told him that the little chicks he’d snatched from a nest last spring would have grown into something like them had he not treated them so roughly.

“Noisy.” He said, pointing to the cages. He didn’t seem to like the noise but it was only that, dislike. It didn’t scare him like other noises did. He wasn’t going to scream or hide or break anything. He was, now, only a boy who couldn’t quite dress himself and didn’t like noises.

“Oh they are, aren’t they. Fussy little things. Do you think maybe Papa forgot to feed them?”

In truth, Cid probably hadn’t been permitted to return to their living quarters at all the entire time that they were gone. But really, he could have had whoever brought her here leave some food for them. She sighed, opening the doors of the cages and letting the birds out for the day, and when she turned back Chaos had already started making his way to the kitchen

Chaos didn’t get much say in his own meals, but he enjoyed helping to prepare food for her and the birds. Something about using the kitchen knives for something good, she supposed, something about bringing happiness to people instead of hurting them. He stood next to her on a footstool, carefully cutting fruit for her and vegetables for the birds, as she prepared his medicine and heated his morning meal. He took his pills first – he could do that by himself now, though his face twisted with disgust as he did it. Usually she’d let him take them with fruit juice instead of water, but today they would almost certainly be taking blood samples before he left. They would know if his diet was any different from what they had prescribed. The injections came after she had wiped the last of his breakfast off his face. Those, he couldn’t do himself. She sat in her chair (opposite Cid’s, which was becoming dusty. He hadn’t been home to do more than sleep in weeks) and Chaos clambered onto her lap, hiding his face against her so he couldn’t see the needles go under his skin.

She kissed the top of his head when she was done and Chaos’ white-knuckled grip on her nightdress loosened. He fell against her as if boneless and rested there while she combed his hair softly between her fingers. It was comfortable. It was normal. It was exactly as if he wouldn’t be facing down a god in twelve hours.

 

* * *

 

“What is Omega?” Owen asked. It wasn’t Doctor Henry, this time, but one of his assistants. He didn’t know this one’s secret name, which meant that he was called ‘Sir’. All boys were called ‘Sir’ if you didn’t know their secret name, and all girls were called ‘Ma’am’ unless they were doctors, in which case you were supposed to call them ‘Doctor’ whether they were a girl or a boy.

They ignored him, which Owen thought was very rude to do. You weren’t supposed to ignore people while you were taking their blood out of them. There were probably rules against it. He tried again, a little more insistent.

“Can I see Omega?”

This one got a response, if not the one that he wanted. The assistant snorted with – something, laughter or disgust – as he attached a new vessel to his arm. That arm was beginning to feel heavy, which was inconvenient for him because he was supposed to be training with the real, metal sword later.

“God, I hope you don’t.” It was a response and not an answer. Owen wasn’t stupid, he knew the difference. The needle was removed from his arm and he dutifully held a cotton ball against the place where it had been until the bleeding stopped. “Have you memorized evacuation procedures?”

“Is Omega why-”

“Answer questions when you are asked them, Control.” The assistant snapped. Owen thought it was very hypocritical (he had learned that word from the assistants, when they had been saying things about one of the doctors in the rest area and hadn’t realised he’d been outside. It meant ‘a person who tells people to do things but doesn’t do those things themselves’. As someone who was told very often to do things, he liked the word very much). “One more chance, or I shall report you.”

“I am to move to the courtyard and report to the soldiers, even if the alarm bell goes off after curfew. I will be expected to help move documents and equipment. They will take us out through the south gate. We are all to wait at the caves south of the beach until the boats arrive.” He recited, taking the cotton ball away from his arm and looking at it as he did, watching the pinprick heal over to avoid looking at the assistant as he spoke. The assistant didn’t respond and Owen waited for a moment, anxious to be told whether he’d remembered properly or not. When no response came, he returned to his mission of learning more about this thing that existed outside of his world.

“Chaos is going to fight Omega, isn’t he?”

“Return to your quarters, Control, and change clothes for training.”

 

* * *

 

“He is still wearing-” Unei could hear the exasperation in her husband’s voice as Chaos leapt at him, still in the hospital gown. Their son grinned, clambering up Cid’s body and rubbing his face against the shoulders of his lab coat.

“He likes it.” She said, shrugging. “He is in his own home. I saw no reason worth forcing him to change.”

Cid didn’t agree. He didn’t need to say anything for her to know. They disagreed on many things. It was, perhaps, why they had found each other in life after life. He would always be wrong about things, and she always right, and so they would draw close to each other like two magnets until he finally admitted that she knew best (he probably thought that it worked the other way around, which was really one more demonstration of how constantly wrong he was). She moved over to him, wrapping her long arms around her son and husband.

“When are we expected?” She asked as Cid’s arms snaked around her waist, leaving a gleeful, wiggling Chaos held between their bodies.

“An hour. He needs to- oof.” Cid had been about to kiss Unei’s neck, but Chaos’ excited wiggling had sent a small foot into his hip. Nothing broken, but there’d be bruises later. “- _careful_ , Chaos.”

“Don’t kick Papa, Mid”

“Yes, ‘ma.”

Cid sighed at that. Unei knew that it was more dangerous than he liked, them giving the boy a kinder name of his own. And she knew that some part of him didn’t want her to use _that_ name – the name they’d agreed they should give to their son should she ever bear him one. It was too personal, too close. He’d tolerated being called Papa, even seemed to enjoy it on good days. He certainly loved their boy. But giving him that name, something that had been made back before they had been brought here, when their lives had been brighter and their futures full of hope-

He wanted to forget that they had known joy, to make the sorrow bearable. She wanted to remember for the same reason. And she was always right.

“He needs to be dressed and brought to the armoury to be prepared. And you-”

Unei took Chaos from her husband’s arms and placed him softly on the floor before standing again, placing a hand under Cid’s chin and turning his head up to face her properly. Chaos giggled and clapped at her as she kissed him right on his (dry, broken – he had been chewing them again. Bad habit) lips.

“I will be well.”

Cid looked as if he had something more to say, but the words had died in his throat. He looked about the room, red and flustered as the first time she had done that in this life, suddenly taking a great interest in the decorations on the bookshelf. She took Chaos’ hand, leading him to the stairs. She would be well, and so would Chaos. Perhaps, Omega would still be her key to freedom, to saving her little family. If not- she would know what to do at the time.

She had built the thing, after all, in another life.


	4. Omega

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another Unei-heavy chapter! Sorry to all those who aren't fans of what is essentially an OC.
> 
> (But then, if you're not into characters who are so much headcanon that they're basically OCs I'm not sure what you're doing in the FF1 tag :D)

She had been still taller in that life, long-lived with elven blood, with her golden hair cropped to just below her ears. It had been her eighty-eighth year, and the man who would become Cid had been haggard and grey at ten years her junior while she remained bright and beautiful. Her elven blood had complicated their shared lifetimes – they had decided that she should abandon this body early, allow its own memory to live the rest of its years in peace, when Cid was forced by age to pass on his memory. Better that than for either of them to live a lifetime without the love of the other.

Omega was their son then, which was to say that he was the one who moved their hearts as Chaos did now. They had no children of their own then, time had flown by and before she had known it Cid was too old for such things, and so all their love was focused upon their work. Omega was perfect – each wire and bolt where it ought to be, each plate of metal polished to a mirror shine. He could never love them back, of course. Unlike Chaos, Omega truly was only a machine. It didn’t stop her from softly cooing to him as she tuned his light sensors, nor from grinning with joy as he ‘saw’ her for the first time.

Cid’s brilliant mind was wasted upon his own work on Omega. He handled the political side of things now, as his body grew less and less capable of the physical work that was needed. He explained the need for what would become Lufenia’s legendary protector to the heads of villages, secured resources for them, tried to comfort neighboring kingdoms with the news that this was a defensive weapon only, never to leave Lufenian lands. His work was invaluable, but without a doubt she was the mastermind.

“You see me now, don’t you?” And Omega gave first a beep of agreement followed by a series of them – a language she and Cid had developed for him between them – to describe his perception of their surroundings. He saw her. He saw the scaffold erected around him for her to work on him safely. He saw the great wax cloth held over them to protect them from the weather (for there wasn’t a building on the continent back then that was large enough to house him). He saw the other workers. He reported ambient air temperature and humidity, the vibrations of the earth. Unei listened, overjoyed just to hear her son speak, as Omega reported all that he could perceive down to the movements of insects in the sand below him. She placed her fingertips in her mouth, whistling to imitate his beeps, and then they were talking between themselves in their secret language. He truly was perfect.

(WarMech had been Cid’s project, a few lifetimes ago, and it would not have been unfair to say that her work on Omega was born in part out of the feeling of always being in competition with her husband. A competition she had won, without doubt. Oh, Cid would argue that WarMech and Omega were built for different purposes and could not rightly be compared, but that was the talk of someone who had just lost soundly to his wife.)

Now, in the present, she rode out to meet Omega. He had remained peaceful for some years now, allowing Onrac to take the Citadel of Trials unopposed and only activating when they tried to march soldiers further inland. That battle had been bloody and short and had forced the invaders to retreat back to the Citadel. But they had taken what they needed, the Lufenian scientist who was working on the floating fortress and his lovely wife.

She had always been seen as nothing more than Cid’s lovely delicate flower of a bride ever since she had been brought here, and she couldn’t understand it. Onrac didn’t seem to treat its women any differently from how it treated its men – there were women among the doctors here, and they seemed well respected – but they seemed utterly convinced that Lufenia, ‘in all of its savagery’, did. Some of the workers here had told her that she was lucky to be here, that she would be treated better than she had been in her home, and she found herself wondering just what lies and propaganda about Lufenia were spread on the mainland. Did Onrac’s citizens believe that the invasion was an endeavor to do good? She supposed that they must believe that. Few people ever thought of themselves as the villains.

Now, Omega seemed to sense Chaos’ growing power. It had activated once again to protect Lufenia. Should he lose, Onrac would certainly march further inland again, claiming the Mirage Tower and the airship there. Once they had the airship, they had their key to the rest of the world. Moving soldiers by sea was risky, but with the airship they could send men to any place they pleased.

Chaos was curled up against her chest once again, trying to pretend to sleep through his fear of riding on the birds – his own chocobo was lost to the plains of Lufenia still and there hadn’t been nearly enough time to convince him to accept a new one. Omega was moving slowly – they would meet just past the mountain ranges that surrounded the Citadel. Great cannons and catapults had been set up on the mountains there to provide covering fire, though she doubted that even at best they could do more than give Omega’s sensors more information to contend with. At worst, they would be wiped out in seconds.

She swallowed, trying to calm her nerves. They could see Omega on the horizon now, massive and dark with the evening sunlight glinting off its metal plating. Chaos stirred and growled in her arms and she pulled him tighter.

Before long, they had found themselves at the edges of the thing’s shadow. It had fired on them a few times now – warning shots, but all the better that Chaos was riding with her. Chaos’ skin bubbled wherever she wasn’t touching it, first growing shiny and crystalline and then expanding out like blown glass. He was ready to fight, no matter how little she cared for the idea.

“You’re going to do wonderfully, I know it.” Unei whispered as she lowered the two of them down from the chocobo. And then she let him go.

It was like he was a slug struck by salt. He sprinted away from her a short distance, so not to burn her, and then bent in upon himself, his skin turning first into hard crystal and then into something like molten glass, bright and shining with heat. His metal chest piece melted against his hardening skin as great blisters formed on his arms and legs. The glass coiled around those tiny bony things on his temples until they formed great horns. His mouth opened wider than it should, melting around the edges. For the briefest of moments, the faces of the people and monsters they had forced into his head could be seen in the expanding glass bubbles, and then they burst and were gone.

He was a monster and not a boy.

Omega sensed it, and a volley of beams struck the place where Chaos stood. They did nothing. When the smoke cleared he stood there still on the ruined earth, skin still bubbling. And then he moved.

Chaos was quick, in this form, faster than birds. They were still a good quarter mile from Omega, but he had closed the distance between them in only a few breaths.

“Fire!”

The sound was deafening. Cannonfire rained down uselessly upon Omega’s metal body, and his primary sensor rotated to turn to its source. As it prepared a second volley of beams to strike down the gunmen, Chaos used the opportunity to launch himself at its underside – as well protected by steel as the rest of it, but without quite so many weapons. Unei couldn’t see from here, but she had known Chaos’ claws – his hands, elongated by molten crystal and metal – to be hot enough to cut through metal as thick as Omega’s shell was. Omega didn’t seem damaged, however. Perhaps gravity had worked against him, pulled him back to the ground before he could cut his way through. He had knocked the beams off course, at least, and they smashed into the mountainside. Not harmlessly, she noted, there had been at least one cry as a gunman was brought low by falling rocks, less devastating than they would have been anyway.

She pulled up her skirts, tying them above her knees, and set off toward Omega and her son while the soldiers accompanying her were distracted by the attack. From behind her, she heard another cry of “Fire” and another deafening wave of cannons. For a moment, she thought that she had managed to break free from her guard cleanly, and then she felt a hand on her arm.

“Ma’am.” The soldier said. He was shorter than her (most people were, but she dwarfed him) with short-cropped reddish hair and skin that looked like it had taken a burning in the summer months even this far north. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. He looked terrified, clearly knowing that he would be punished terribly for letting her leave his side, but just as clearly not wanting to go with her. She tried to speak softly.

“I will return, but I must stay with Chaos. If he finishes this battle to find me missing- oh, you understand, don’t you?” The man (a boy, really) looked away for a moment, something clearly on his mind. She took a guess at what it was. “It must be hard for all of you, being so far from your families. And he is only a boy-”

He bit his lip – she had guessed right. This must be his first time so far from home, away from his own mother. Maybe brothers and sisters.

“I’ll-” He was trying to speak with authority, but her softness and her appeal to his own love for his family had clearly wormed its way into his heart. “-I’ll stay with you, ma’am. To protect you.”

It was not what she had hoped for – she had hoped that he would turn tail, that he would suddenly see returning alive to his family as something that was worth abandoning his duties for. Hopefully she could lose him before she reached Omega. Or maybe he would be trustworthy. Either way, she continued on.

After his initial nervousness, the boy soldier became more and more eager to talk. She had that effect on people, she supposed, and she was more than happy to listen. He told her about his mother, a stern woman who had brought him and his sisters up alone after his father had been killed in battle. He told her about how she had cried the day he enlisted, determined to walk in his father’s footsteps, and how he had promised to return home to her. How this had been meant to be a safe posting until Omega has shown himself. Halfway through an anecdote about his oldest sister’s little girl, he froze.

Chaos had been tossed back, not too far from them. One of is arms had hardened proper, and parts of it had shattered away. He took a little too long to get up, and blood – boiling blood, hissing into steam as it hit the cool evening air – streamed from a nasty wound above his eye. He stood, and one of Omega’s great metal legs came down upon him. Unei’s voice died in her throat. The leg came up, and Chaos stood once again. He had seen Unei now and screamed out a bestial cry for help, for her to tell him that this was enough and the test was over.

She brought two fingers and a thumb to her lips and whistled.

Omega stopped. Short whistles followed long ones as she spoke to it in the language they had shared lifetimes ago.

 

> _User Unei requesting manual control. Disable all autonomous functions. Prepare to initiate-_
> 
>  

Something struck her head and she was knocked to the floor. When she looked up, the soldier boy stood above her, eyes narrowed.

“You- You could control that thing all along!” He yelled in disbelief. She brought a hand to her head. Blood, from where he had struck her with the butt of his gun. It was pointed at her now. “Don’t deny it- you did that- that thing, with your mouth, and then it stopped. You were going to use it- it and him- to kill us all, weren’t you? To get your revenge? Lufenian witch!”

“Omega.” She began. The boy had tears in his eyes. He felt betrayed, didn’t he? That he had just poured his heart out to someone who had kept so many secrets from him. “Omega, kill this man.”

His eyes widened in terror and his finger tightened on the trigger, but a thin beam of light had already gone through him and he toppled to the ground.

Chaos staggered over to her, crawling over her fallen body, nuzzling his still-hot face against the cut.

“Omega, disable all weapons. Prepare for disassembly.”

Omega gave a sequence of beeps in response, as she held Chaos close for just a moment and whispered in his ear. “You can do this, Mid.”

The great Omega Weapon did not initiate counter attacks as Chaos pounced upon it, tearing through its metal shell, and Unei lay back upon the ground in the hope that her head would stop spinning if she remained still.

 

* * *

 

 

She woke on a sled of sorts, being pulled by two chocobos. It bumped uncomfortably on the ground and she found herself considering before anything else that the device for moving patients might be improved immensely with a levistone or two so that it could glide over the ground instead of being jostled along it. She thought of her son next, panicking for only a moment that he was not in her arms before seeing him hovering over her in concern. He had returned to normal, as far as he would ever be normal, with injuries crystallized over for now. Her own flesh was not capable of such a thing - she could feel a rough bandage wrapped around her head, which felt like to split open. The world still had not ceased its constant moving about. She would come up with the story of Chaos’ victory later. The boy knew not to tell people things without her say so.

“How many men were aboard Omega?” She asked, and it came out of her lips sounding more like a groan of pain than anything else.

“Twenty or so, from what we could retrieve.” Came a voice from one of the chocobos. “Couldn’t capture a soul alive. Boy didn’t like that they’d hurt you.”

Good. They believed that Omega had been the one to strike her down. That the boy who had followed her had been a casualty of its stuggle with Chaos.. But- her stomach twisted at that. Twenty lufenians, dead at Chaos’ hands. That was dreadful. She reached up for her son, who fell immediately to the ground and shuffled up against her. Omega’s crew – they must have threatened her while she was unconscious. She couldn’t blame them, in truth, for she knew she was a traitor now.

“He- Omega will regenerate. It will take years, maybe decades, but he cannot be truly killed.” Perhaps she was revealing too much of what she knew, now. It couldn’t be helped. Her mind immediately turned to the rift on Onrac’s mainland, the place where they had found the living crystal ore that had set all of this into motion. Omega would remember Chaos. He would become aggressive to anything similar. If he were trapped in a place flooded with the stuff her son was crafted from-

-it would keep him busy. But maybe, just maybe, he could return, emerging in Onrac’s heart when this was all over. She never had been one to seek out vengeance, but…

“The Rift. Disassemble what remains of Omega and have it taken as deep into that place as you can manage.”

The man on the chocobo laughed. It sounded warm – he truly believed that they were fighting on the same side. “Don’t have the authority to order that, maam. Nor d’you, for that matter. But I’ll run it by whoever I can find to listen.”

Omega’s defeat would only be the beginning, she knew. It would be only a matter of weeks before they found the airship, and with Chaos now proven in battle not much longer before the two of them were placed upon it and sent to the doors of Onrac’s enemies. She turned the words ‘lufenian witch’ over and over in her mind and pulled Chaos close, surrendering to sleep again.

 

* * *

 

Garland was of the opinion that there were things little girls needed to know just as much as little boys. He hadn’t had much say over Jayne’s education and all of the things that he wanted her to know that were not ‘proper’ he had had to teach her himself. Sarah, though, was his goddaughter. And so he was only doing his duty, as far as he was concerned, when he scandalized the entire court by bringing a barber into the sewing room to have her taught how to properly suture a wound. Between music lessons and history, he had her study under locksmiths and apothecaries so that nobody might keep her locked away or try to poison her food. As she made bouquets she also worked under the royal gardener, learning all of the plants and their uses. And swordsmanship? Swordsmanship she studied under him.

Quite literally, at present, as he demonstrated the weakness in her posture by knocking her to the ground and she responded by being a nuisance under his feet, kicking and waving her sword around and trying to trip him. He stepped back – the little princess was wearing twice her body size in padding, but that wouldn’t save her from injury if she succeeded in tripping him and bringing his weight down upon herself.

“You never let me win.” She said with a pout, unsuccessfully trying to pull off her padding to indicate that she was done with this lesson.

“I don’t intend to. You ought to win whether or not I let you.” He said. Sarah’s response to this was to lie on the floor, because she was how she responded to a lot of things that she didn’t care for. He poked her belly with the blunt wooden practice blade (they had been using real swords until Jayne caught wind of it. They did not any more). “Work harder. I shan’t be here forever, and you shall need to carry a blade of your own.”

“I don’t want to. I shaln’t need to fight people. When I am queen, nobody will be allowed to fight anybody.”

He had to suppress a laugh at that. She sounded so much like her mother had at that age. He poked her in the belly again. “And what if they do so anyway? How would you stop them?”

“I will tell them to stop, of course. And I shall take away their swords.”

“How do you mean to do that? They will fight to keep their weapons, Sarah.”

She turned onto her side, sulking and swatting away the wooden sword. “You’re not doing it right. You’re making the people all bad, and wrong, and _difficult_.” People called Sarah ‘difficult’ often and so as far as she was concerned it was the worst possible thing for a person to be. “They shall all listen to me and put down their swords and I shall tell them to clean dishes for a week, and then they will have learned their lesson.”

He was about to continue this when he found himself interrupted by a messenger. A messenger who took one look at the princess curled up on the floor and Garland standing above her and seemed about ready to scream bloody murder until Sarah sat up and brushed herself off, trying to look proper even with her arms still wrapped in so much padding that she couldn’t put them against her body.

“My lady-”

“-’m fine. What is it?” Her voice was quieter around people who were not Garland. She was more proper, less prone to sulking and demanding that she have her own way. Garland stood by her, listening intently.

“Sir Garland, the queen has ordered you to gather your troops and set out immediately for Elfheim. A flying vessel was sighted passing in their direction. We must protect our allies.”

Garland said nothing, placing his helmet over his head. Sarah tilted her head at him, asking something about whether she would be allowed to see the airship, but he couldn’t quite convince his ears to hear her. An airship meant that either Lufenia was attacking or that the legendary defenses that protected it had been breached and its great airship stolen. Both were unthinkable.

Kneeling, he placed the wooden training sword into the princess’ tiny hands.

“You will need this, Princess. Protect Cornelia until my return.”

Sarah nodded as solemnly as she could with her arms sticking out at the sides like a starfish, making a mostly-failed attempt to salute him like a soldier with her wooden sword and her sticky-out arms. Garland took up his own blade - the proper, metal one - and saluted back. 


	5. Elfheim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short one, this time!

Owen did not like interrogation training.

He had expected not to like it, even as he had begged for it to be moved forward so that he might possibly catch up with Chaos and go flying about in the great airship as he was. He had expected it to hurt. A lot of things hurt, and he supposed that if people wanted you to do something that you didn’t want to do then hurting you would be the way to do it.

It did not hurt. Or at least, it was not supposed to. Therein lay the problem.

“Here, take one.” Said the man opposite him, warm and smiling as he offered a bowl of sweets. Owen took one, then put it down in front of him, looking at it. He probably wasn’t allowed to eat it. He was meant to have only a tiny amount of sugar a day, and the boiled sweet he had taken would contain far more than that. He poked at it and its colourful wrapping, looking at the people around him for permission or disapproval. None came.

Interrogation training was held not in the dark, horrible places he had expected but in the staff living quarters. Sunlight streamed in through the windows onto carpeted floor. The walls were painted a soothing blue. The air was thick with the smell of cut flowers. He had been placed on the softest chair he had ever seen, across a small table from a smiling man he didn’t know, and simply told not to tell that man anything from the set of data they’d had him memorize. He had no other orders to follow, which was new and strange and upsetting, and nobody told him whether he was doing things wrong or right. He had asked if he should take off his boots on the carpeted floor, and only been told to do as he pleased. He had asked if he was supposed to sit on the soft chair or to stand and the man (an actor, he knew, it had taken a few weeks to bring him over to the facility) laughed and told him he was allowed to stand if he wished. And now there was the sweet, and nobody would tell him if eating it was wrong or right either.

He couldn’t escape the feeling that he was failing a long sequence of tests.

“What is your name, son?” The man asked. Owen pressed his lips together, remembering what Unei told him about secrets.

“Control.”

The man just laughed again. “Oh, that’s not any sort of name for a boy.” He leaned forward, smile widening. “What should I call you?”

Owen scooted backward on the chair without thinking, picking up the sweet and playing with the wrapper. He should have been happy that someone wanted to know who he really was, but something about being told he was wrong about his own name - even if he was lying – it all felt unpleasant. He pulled at the sides of the sweet wrapper, watching as it unrolled itself, and then twisted them shut again. He tried to focus on the crinkling of it and not on the bright colours and the overwhelming smells of everything.

“...Owen.” He mumbled quietly.

He could see the man’s teeth when he grinned at that. He looked away, turning to the assistants who were observing and taking notes. They were frowning a little – was it in concentration, or had that been the wrong thing to do?

“Just going to play with that, aren’t you, son? Not hungry?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Was that an instruction to eat the sweet? He couldn’t tell. Nobody was telling him what he should do, and that was making this very difficult.

“I have a nephew your age, you know.” The man began again. Owen looked from the sweet to him, then back, then back again. It sounded like it had been an instruction, so he opened the sweet and out it in his mouth. He swallowed it whole, feeling the taste of syrup and fruit on his tongue twisting his head around even further than the colourful room and the soft chair and the warm voice already were. “Lives over in Pravoka. Can’t wait to see him again.” He motioned to the sweet bowl. “Do tell me if you like them, so I know if I should take some back for him.”

Pravoka. That had been one of the places on the list he’d been given. Soldiers were being withdrawn from Pravoka, for expectation of a disaster of some sort. The man was still talking about the sweets, about the kind of things his nephew liked, as if he didn’t know.

(The list was false information, of course, nothing sensitive. He recognised that, distantly, but it was hard to remember much of anything right now. Everything was too alien, too new, and every sense he had burned with it)

“You were training with that sword earlier, weren’t you? He’d have loved to see that – loves to watch the soldiers, he does. You’d like him, I think. About your age, looks a lot like our friend over there.”

Owen looked to the side, at the assistant that the man was motioning to. A slight man, with tan skin and brown hair and bright green eyes. He could picture the boy in his mind now. Probably a little shorter than him, with the assistant’s bushy brown hair and green eyes and this man’s wide smile, watching the soldiers and trying to imitate them. He could see him running in terror as the seas encroached upon the city, water swallowing the streets, betrayal in his eyes as he realised that the soldiers had left him and the other civilians to face the disaster alone. It ceased to matter to him that the data he’d been given was false, and it ceased to matter that he would fail the test. He had to do something.

“Is he- can you write him? Can you send a messenger?” He said, very quietly. “He’s- he’s in danger, I think.” The man’s grin grew to a great nasty slash across his face. The assistant looked up from his transcribing to sigh.

“And what would he be in such danger from, son?”

It was only hours later, after he’d vomited up the sweet and turned down his lunch and spent self-directed study curled up in his bed trying not to think too much, that he realised that for being so determined to know his name the interrogator had never once called him by it.

 

* * *

 

Garland watched with jealous awe as the threads of elven magic flew past him. He could boast substantial magical ability, especially for a citizen of Cornelia whose people were not traditionally blessed with exceptional prowess in the ways of magic, but this- this was worlds beyond him. From nothing the elves wove together something horrible but beautiful, a monster of clouds and stars, with a thin fleshy body surrounding a massive gaping maw. Fog poured from its great mouth and he strode around it, staring into it and seeing the things dance about in there. There were whole other worlds inside the thing, places he could not imagine. And somewhere beyond them, visible for only fractions of a second at a time, was a great nothing – a nothing that was the most terrible thing that Garland had seen in all his years.

“This is Atomos.” He said. It was intended as a question but it came out sounding like an order – that it _should_ be named that. Many things accidentally found themselves turning into orders when Garland said them. He had seen the beast before, but only in texts. In truth, he had never seen any of the eidolons so close. Now, he fought at the side of Elfheim’s summoner corps, tasked with defending the summoners while they focused on keeping their monster in this world. “Then the situation is desperate.”

“It is.” The elven man at his side answered. “If Onrac succeeded in destroying Lufenia’s defenses, they must have done so with ten- maybe twenty times the men we thought they had. Atomos- Atomos has asked a heavy price, but we cannot risk calling upon anything lesser.”

Garland nodded. He did not understand fully the contracts that the elves had made with the Eidolons, only that they were strict in their terms. The elves paid the Eidolons for their service with offerings every seven years. Of food, of songs and dance, of fine crafts. And, from time to time, of blood. He chose not to consider too hard what price Atomos had asked for his protection. The airship hovered overhead. It couldn’t carry that many men itself, but both he and the elves knew there must be some plan. Intelligence suggested it might have made multiple trips, and that a great army was hidden in the forests. Onrac knew as well as any that Elfheim’s eidolons were great and terrible – it made no sense that they should attack without some plan.

Garland snatched a spyglass from the waiting hands of a squire as the airship finally came to earth and watched as less then ten men emerged, flanking a woman with a boy in her arms.

That was not an army.

There was brightness, then, so much that he had to drop the spyglass and look away or risk going blind. Something burned white hot, and then whatever it is was dashing toward them.

“Open the Wormhole!” Came a voice from his side. He took up his blade, placing himself between the small group of people and the summoner corps.

It was the soldiers who were drawn in first. The woman stood there still as a rock even as parts of the airship behind her peeled off into Atomos’ great maw, her long hair flapping in the incredible wind. Her son – whatever it had become, was struggling more against it but holding his ground. But then – then the woman shouted something, and the boy crouched and leapt for the eidolon, reaching its great mouth before any of the soldiers.

It should have been over with that. Garland was well read, he knew full well what Atomos could do. The Wormhole would absorb anything that came close, and then whether they were alive was a matter for philosophers and clergymen to decide. If they were, they were alive elsewhere, worlds away from home.

But from his position behind Atomos, Garland saw something pierce through the back of the eidolon. There was panic all about him, as more summoners gathered to try to repair the tear in their beast, but the damage was already done. The boy-thing tore its way through the eidolon until it could maintain its grasp on reality no longer and fell into the middle of their ranks. Garland could see him more closely now – still no taller than his princess, but a burning, boiling thing of light and heat and crystal where before he had been a child. There were shouts and screams as arrows fell down upon them from archers trying to shoot down the little monster. Those that could have struck it burned in the air, those that were off course peppered the now-defenseless summoners. One of them found its way between the plates of his armour, and in the second that it managed to distract him for, the little beast was upon the corps’ leader, screeching and snarling and clawing at him.

Garland picked the boy up by a horn and with one hand tossed him away. Even though metal gauntlets and leather gloves, he could feel his skin crack and blister from the brief contact. He couldn’t bring himself to care. His heart was bating in his ears now, blood coursing through his veins in a way that it never did in palace gardens and halls. He lived for Cornelia, for his queen, for his young princess. But more than any of that, he lived for this.

He dashed at the boy, trying to knock him back by bashing him with his shoulder, but found himself caught. The boy shoved him to the ground and tried to dive upon him, but he rolled away and, with a click of the fingers on his unburned hand, sent a pillar of earth up out of the ground to knock the boy further back. Behind him, he could hear shouting – the summoners were preparing to retreat while he held the monster at bay. Swordsmen were taking the field, not to aid him but to capture the soldiers, the ones who Atomos had tried to devour. The little beast bit into his arm, mouth so hot that his armour melted against it and allowed his teeth to pierce through, and Garland hissed in pain. He swung his arm, sending the boy flying still further away. It wasn’t just the plan any more, wasn’t just him protecting the summoners and allowing them to retreat. This was his opponent now, this boy who had felled an eidolon.

His heart was racing. He could barely feel the pain for the thrill of battle, and for the first time in years he could feel himself forgetting that he was mortal.

He was getting a feel for his opponent. He was strong, impossibly so. But he was also light. He could anchor himself against the ground impossibly well for one of his weight, but he was fond of jumping about and in the air-

-his fist struck the boy’s chest as he pounced at him again. Without anything to anchor himself with, he flew back toward the airship and the woman. Garland gave chase, pinning him with a foot on his chest and bringing his great sword down by the side of his head. The woman ran forward, horror on her face, and Garland looked between the boy and his mother before tossing the sword aside and rolling the boy over with his foot.

“I do not kill _children_.” He said, voice transitioning from a laugh to a burning fury as his focus moved from the boy to his mother. They were far away from the elves, now, and he wished to speak. “But I think I might kill the wretches who hide behind them. Call him off, and summon your masters so we may discuss the terms of your surrender.”

The boy flung himself at Garland once again. This time, Garland offered no resistance. He almost seemed amused as he toppled to the ground.

“Call him off,” He repeated as the monster crawled over his chest, voice steady even as his flesh burned under its touch. “And we will discuss the terms of your surrender.”

The woman moved forward to stand over him, looking down at him with what he thought might be curiosity.

“You have lost.” She said calmly. But as she moved closer to the boy, he changed. Cooled. “What right have you to speak of terms?”

The boy - and he was a boy again – moved back. He hid himself in the woman’s skirts. He stood. Even at his full height, the woman was only a little shorter than he.

“I want the boy.” He said, and the woman’s face turned stony.

“Think well on what you mean to say next. I can kill you just as well as he.”

“Those are my terms. The boy comes to Cornelia, and he does not see battle again until he comes of age.” The woman opened her mouth to interrupt, and he turned his head to look at the child. “If Cornelia has proven herself a friend to him then, I would see him become my successor. If not, he may do as he will. For as long as he remains there, he stands under my protection.”

The pause that followed was long, long enough for the adrenaline to fade and for the wounds of the battle to trouble him. He fell to a knee, grasping at the scorched remains of the arrow that had caught him and panting for air. And then, in that moment, the foolishness of this overtook him. He remembered that he was mortal. He remembered that he had put himself at the mercy of this woman and her monster, risked everything because he had found someone who might be able to succeed him. If he were wrong, if he had misjudged the two of them, if he were to die here at their hands, it would be a death he deserved.

“His name is Mid.” The woman said, and then she knelt by him. Softly, she took his arm and twined the fingers of his gauntlet around her throat. Mid bristled, but the woman reached over to stroke his hair and he calmed again. “Stand, Sir Garland of Cornelia. I am your hostage. Take us back to the airship.”


	6. The Airship

“But _I_ want to go on the airship.”

Sarah was sulking as she putted about the infirmary, playing nurse to Garland as best she could in between the real healers distracting her with odd jobs to keep her out of the way. The court didn’t care much for the idea of her being here, and nor did the poor healers who had to go about their work with a small excitable princess running about under their feet. But Sarah liked to be where she felt she was needed.

Cornelia was the kingdom of dreams and stories, where tales of great heroes began. And she, Sarah had decided, should be part of those tales. Not as something pretty to win or rescue and not as the queen who set them upon their journey, but as something important. Something worth singing about. And people who were important in stories shouldn’t suffer from a churning stomach at the sight of blood.

“I have been good, Uncle Garland.” She was changing the bandages on his bitten arm now. Her stomach did turn a little, seeing it. The flesh was swollen and discoloured where it wasn’t scorched, and she had heard the healers say that it would take a miracle for him to be able to move it again as he used to. But if miracles could happen anywhere, it was in Cornelia. She pulled a face at it, taking a cloth soaked with water and plant oils to wipe it down. “I did all of my work, even the- the chocobo-business.”

(She whispered those last words, and Garland smiled despite the discomfort. He had bid her spend time among the kingdom’s farmers in his absence to learn how they coaxed the fields to grow in a time of famine. They had taught her about the rotation of crops, he suspected, and about fertilizer, and even Sarah knew that it was not proper for a lady to talk about how people’s food was grown in animal droppings.)

“I should be allowed at the neg-… neg-oh-shee-...”

“Negotiations.” Garland corrected, and Sarah nodded emphatically. “And wring the excess potion from the dressing before you apply it.”

“I knew that! I was about to do it.” She said, so defensively that it was crystal clear that she had forgotten. Having soaked the new dressing with the contents of a potion bottle, she squeezed out the excess so that it was only damp and not wet, and began to wrap the injury.

“Negotiations are no place for children, Princess. Your mother and I will represent Cornelia there, and you will stay here with your father to protect the castle.”

“The boy will be there, though, won’t he?”

Garland sighed, reaching over to rub the top of Sarah’s head. She hated when he did that, because she knew that it meant that something was happening that nobody wanted to tell her about. She pouted at him, setting aside her task to put her hair right.

“Mid will be there because the airship is where his people are staying. And then he will come back.”

Mid stayed in the guest quarters with the lufenian lady. They did not leave, and Sarah had been forbidden to go to see them. She had met him once, when he came to the palace as Garland’s guest (he had said ‘hostage’, but Garland was surely too kind a person to really take hostages). He was shorter than her, with hair that was long in some places and bald in others. His skin was covered in big round marks and he looked a little like he had horns and Sarah thought he looked very sick. She had curtseyed to him, and after some prompting from the pretty lady who was with him he had bowed to her, and Garland had told her that when the negotiations were done the boy would be his ward and that that meant he would live in the castle and that they should be friends. After that she had been dismissed so that the adults could speak. When she returned they had already left for the guest quarters.

Picking up a bottle from the tray of medicine the healers had left, Sarah squinted at the label. “This one...” She had always picked up her letters and numbers much slower than she had studies that involved working or learning new information. If it weren’t for wanting to read stories on her own, she probably wouldn’t have even tried that hard with her reading – it came slowly to her and make her feel small and stupid. “-it’s to stop in-fect-i-on. You have to take it now, because the cut was just ex-pose-d to air.”

Garland nodded, taking the bottle from her. “And what do you think it will taste like?”

That one, Sarah didn’t need to read to be able to answer. She scrunched up her face and stuck her tongue out. “Probably like this.”

(She was right, it was awful.)

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t until they were stood upon the airship that Garland suspected that things may not go the way he had intended. Jayne sat at one side of the negotiating table in all her royal finery, perfumed and powdered and looking more painting than human. He stood at her side – he should have sat, really, both for propriety’s sake and for the sake of his health, but he couldn’t bear to risk wincing as he did so and giving away that he was not quite so powerful now as he wished he were. His bad arm was bound tightly, but beneath his repaired armour there was no telling he had been injured if one did not already know.

Unei sat at his other side, beautiful and unmoving, her face giving away nothing. And at her side, sat upon several cushions so that he was level with the table, was Mid. He had been washed and scrubbed properly since the battle, and tended to as best the white mages could tend to something that was so alien to them. A fine set of boy’s clothes had been found and adjusted for him, and he looked exactly like a small boy confronted with a tie for the first time in his life. Which was what he was.

But they, and the officials from Onrac at the other side of the table, were the only ones there.

“Where are the elves?” Garland demanded, before anyone else could speak. “What trickery-”

The man at the head of Onrac’s side of the table turned behind him. “Call in the messenger boy, the Cornelians have not heard the sad news.”

Garland felt the blood leave his face as an elven boy poked his head into the room nervously, bowing low to everyone in attendance before moving to the table, a long paper in his trembling hands. Even before the boy opened his mouth, he knew something was terribly wrong. He heard the word ‘Atomos’ spill from his shaking lips, and Garland felt ice in his veins.

What kind of price had the eidolon demanded?

“-We have no royal family. The king is dead, and his son has been claimed by a sleep from which he cannot be woken."

Garland held the table to steady himself. Even through the powders and blush, he could see that Jayne’s face had turned pale. Even Unei’s face had moved, her mouth opened only slightly as Mid tugged at her arm and tried to ask her questions. If the elves could not speak here, if they stood alone-

“Now.” The official’s face had turned sinister, and guilt flashed over the elven boy’s face. It had been no accident, had it, that news of this had not reached Cornelia? “We were to speak of terms of peace, were we not?”

By the third hour, Garland had sat. The shock and his injuries overwhelmed him, and for long periods of time blackness overtook him. Jayne spoke for Cornelia and Elfheim both, brave and beautiful. They could not keep Mid. He, and the soldiers the elves had captured, would be given back to Onrac as the price of peace, to protect Cornelia. Unei had looked at him with daggers in her eyes at that. Mid had simply looked confused, adrift. This was not _right._ He had been prepared. Unei had told him of the people whose memories made up Mid. He understood very little of it, save for that one part of him had been Cornelian once, a captured spy used for the experiments in place of a death sentence, and they had meant to use this to assert that Mid was a Cornelian citizen and subject to her laws and protections. But without the elves at their side, and with Jayne determined to argue well for them in their absence, they had so little leverage and so much they needed to achieve.

“Not a governor.” Jayne said, shaking her head. They were speaking of Elfheim, now, and what could be given to buy its protection in the absence of its own royal family. “Onrac may send an adviser, but the elves govern themselves.”

“But this is a favour to the elves, dear Queen. We only wish to spare them the upheaval caused by the royal family’s absence. If we install a governor, think of the coups that might be stopped, the lives that might be spared. And of course, they would have our protection.”

Jayne gritted her teeth. It wasn’t purely altruism that motivated her, Garland knew, for the elves had been a dear ally to Cornelia for many years and without them they were vulnerable. But there was altruism there, too. He would not have followed her for this long were there not.

“It is not my place to allow this. Send an adviser, and he will be there with Cornelia’s blessing. When the prince awakes, they can decide for themselves how they wish to be ruled and protected.”

Garland’s vision went dark again. This was too much, too soon after his battle. He had sorely underestimated the extent of his injuries. They were speaking on collateral, on how Onrac could know that Cornelia would not claim Elfheim for her own, and then-

“- _The Crown Princess_.”

-He stood immediately, sending the chair clattering to the floor behind him. His head swam with the effort, but he slammed his hands down on the table and glared through his facemask. Mid started with alarm, but Unei hushed him.

“Unacceptable! I will have your head-”

Jayne looked horrified herself, but she pressed her lips together and breathed in, then placed a hand on Garland’s calmly.

“Is there nothing else we could give you? I would go willingly, or Sir Garland, or my husband-”

“We would not dream of taking a queen from her people, but none less than your heir will suffice. Fear not, though. She will be cared for well. Safer, I imagine, than she would be in Cornelia were you to refuse.”

It was a threat. Garland began to growl something in response, he didn’t know what. A threat of his own, probably. A demand that every official on this airship be sent to the gallows for even considering such a demand. A plea for his queen not to consider this. Anything. It cut away in his throat, and Jayne’s hand clenched his until he could feel her beautifully painted nails breaking against his gauntlets.

“I accept.”

Garland sagged against the table, trying to hold himself up with his one good arm. He felt old and broken.

“The boy.” He managed to force out. “She stays with the boy, under his protection. I trust nobody else with her care.”

Mid stared at him, and then at Unei, and pointed to himself. Unei looked at him in bewilderment before something set across her face, as if he’d told her a plan and she understood it. The official seemed confused, but looked to the two advisors at his side, who nodded.

“Very well.”

Jayne’s shoulders heaved with contained sobs. The elven messenger ran over to Garland’s side, righting his chair so that he could sit. Mid was whispering something to Unei about how he didn’t know how to look after a girl, and could he have a bird instead.

“Trade.” Jayne’s voice came out strangled, but determined. “We have not spoken of trade. If these talks are to cost me my daughter, I would finish them properly."

 

* * *

 

“I don’t want this one.” Sarah said, pushing the old lute across the bed and away from her. “It’s old, and it’s too big for me. I have a little one in the music room, and that one’s much prettier and easier to play.”

She was packing her things (or rather, she was complaining about everything that they packed for her). Garland could not move. The healers had scolded him for pushing himself too hard, but he had only demanded that a great chair be brought to the princess’ room so that he could help her prepare for the journey. Jayne looked older today than she had before they had gone to the negotiations, great bags under her eyes and the rose in her cheeks gone.

“Sarah, this lute has been in our family for generations. My grandmother gave it to my mother, and her to me. And now I am giving it to you. You will take it, and it will protect you.”

“Musical instruments can’t protect people, mother.” She said, putting her hands on her hips. “And Garland will protect me. And all the soldiers, and papa-”

Jayne grabbed her daughter then, pulling her very close and sobbing. Sarah just seemed confused. They had explained this all to her, but she didn’t quite understand it. “I’ll take it! I’ll take it! You’re squishing me, mama!”

They chose dresses for her to take, and toys, and books. Sarah prepared what she called ‘rations’, which was a box of sweet-smelling tea leaves and a tin of hard sweets. She picked out proper clothes for going on an airship. (“I can’t wear a skirt on an airship!” She had said, clearly having given this a lot more thought than anything else. “It’ll blow up into the air and everyone shall see my underthings. I want to wear boy’s clothes on the airship.”) All of it was packed into a large trunk. By the end of it, Jayne seemed worn to a thread.

“I cannot sleep.” She confessed to Garland in a hushed voice, as Sarah wrestled on her bed with a stuffed behemoth that was too large to bring with her – her way of saying goodbye to it. “If I do, the morning will come all the sooner. And then she will be gone.”

“My apologies. I should have-” He didn’t know how to end that. He had been the one who demanded to speak of terms of peace. He was responsible for this. But then, if he had not- Elfheim would still have been leaderless. They would have still been forced into peace talks where Cornelia had virtually nothing to give. All that would have been different was that either he or Mid would be dead.

“There is so much we should have done, should have known.” She sighed. “These are cruel times, where children are used for war. I was naive to think that she could have grown up happy, in peacetime.”

Garland peered over at Sarah, who had seemingly used up all of her wrestling energy and fallen asleep, curled up against the large behemoth doll.

“I do not see there a child there who wants for joy. Good sense, perhaps. Understanding-”

Jayne only gave a tired laugh. Tears glinted at the sides of her eyes.

“You are coming dangerously close to insulting your princess, Sir Garland, and I shall hear no more of it.”

“Then rest yourself, and let me insult my joyful princess out of your earshot.” He shook his head. “It would not do for you to send her off half-asleep. Rest.”

It was only after Jayne was gone that he pushed himself to his feet and strode over to Sarah’s bed. He stoked her pink hair until she stirred, sitting up to address him.

“’was just pretending to sleep.” She said, as if he’d caught her sleeping through lessons again. “’m working hard. All packed.”

“You have a task, princess, while you are away. An important one, to serve Cornelia.”

That got her attention. She perked up, leaning in to give him her full attention. “What is it? I can do it.”

“The boy Mid. One day you will have the chance to come back. When you do, you are to bring him with you. He is strong, he will protect you all of the way. You only need to guide him home.”


	7. Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THE THREE MAIN CHARACTERS ARE FINALLY IN THE SAME PLACE I am so relieved about this. Soon I can switch from BIG DRAMA to kids being cute for a few chapters.
> 
> Next, hopefully I can work on everyone actually knowing everyone else's names so I don't have to keep saying 'the man' or 'the girl'

Unei had felt a great deal of things over the past few weeks. But right now, right now she was delighted. All this time, she had wanted her son to know a normal life. All this time, she had hoped that he was not too strange, too broken to ever know companionship outside of her and Cid.

He had spent exactly an hour in the Princess’ presence before he’d taken to holding her hand all of the time as if she were an anchor. She had asked him many questions about the airship, and he had led her around it, pointing at things and telling her about them in short one or two word bursts, the same way he talked to her.

“Spin!” He said, pointing their joined hands at a gear, so that she had to point as well. “It spins and- Makes the clanks clank! And then everything flies!”

Unei laughed. She had told Chaos the proper name for all of the parts of the ship many times before, but he insisted on calling them all by what they did or the noise they made. Gears would always be ‘spins’ to him, it seemed, no matter how many times he was corrected.

Things had not gone as she had wished. She had thought that they had a chance to escape, to live in Cornelia until Owen came of age. But the business with the elves had changed things. Still, things seemed brighter than they had before. Garland sat at her side. He was still recovering under that armour, she knew, but it would be difficult to see for someone who didn’t know. He hated this, all of it, she could feel the anger radiating from him even as the children remained blissfully ignorant to the unfairness of everything, but they were making the best of things.

“She will be safe.” She said, looking at the children playing and talking. Chaos had sat on the floor, pulling Sarah down with him, and was telling her about his home and his papa. “He will protect her, and I will protect her, and we shall all return to your kingdom. I could- I think I could stand to spend a lifetime there, for his sake.”

It would be overstating things to say that she considered the cornelian knight a friend – he had hurt her son, and he had failed them both at the negotiations. But he was an ally, and she had few enough of those to treasure the ones she had. He did not answer for a moment, and Unei knew that the concept of living more than one life was something that caught in his mind.

“If I save him. Him and you and your husband. Would you teach me? Show me how to pass myself on, as you do?”

Unei thought on this for a moment. “I do not know that I can. The dragons did not permit us to share their secrets with any outside of our village. My husband’s experiments stretch our deal with them to its limits.” She paused. “But I could find the dragons for you, and such actions would surely prove you worthy of their blessings.”

Sarah had tried to touch the moving gears, and Garland stood to stop her before Chaos pulled her hand back, shaking his head and expressing in short words and massive gestures that doing so would be bad. The two of them watched the children in silence for a while.

“I have another favour to ask, Garland of Cornelia.” She said after a while. The children were too far away to overhear now, Chaos going through Sarah’s luggage to look at her toys while she scolded him for being too rough with her things. Unei’s voice turned darker.

 

* * *

 

Everything was in disarray.

Owen was a little glad for this, secretly, because yesterday had been meant to be more interrogation training and it had been thrown off entirely by preparations for Chaos and Unei’s return. He was glad for Chaos and Unei’s safe return, too, because he had been told in interrogation training what _other places_ did to their captured prisoners and how lucky he was to be asked nicely. But disarray was still disarray, and he liked having every little thing in order. He hoped that they would come home soon and be safe, and that any celebration of it would not last too long.

The set of rooms opposite his was being cleaned and prepared for use, which caught his attention. They asked him to help, and as he brought bedding down from the storage area to make the bed there he asked questions – was Chaos going to live opposite him, as had been planned originally? Or had he failed so badly in the interrogation training that he needed supervision now as well, and was a staff member coming to watch him?

They were going to host a guest, he was told. She would be staying here, and they did not know for how long. He was to be cautious when answering her questions, and to report her to a staff member if she asked or did anything strange.

He had more questions, so many more, but they had no more answers for him.

Now he was in his best clothes, the ceremonial armour he wore for inspections. It was heavier than his normal clothes, but not as heavy as proper armour, with a horned helmet and a shortsword at his hip. He stood with the guard, saluting the airship properly as they did when it made its landing outside. The gates opened slowly to allow the returning Chaos and Unei home.

Chaos entered first, dashing through the open gates. But it was not Unei who immediately followed him. It was another child, a little taller, with smart clothes and soft pink hair tied back into a tight bun. She (it was hard to tell from here, because she was wearing boy’s clothes, but Owen could only assume that this was the guest that had been mentioned, and they had said the guest was a girl) looked around nervously a little before Chaos took her hand and dragged her to one side, pointing off toward the staff living quarters where he lived and gesturing excitedly.

Owen looked to the doctors in confusion, but they looked just as shocked. Chaos didn’t speak unless spoken to. He was excitable, but he was also quiet and afraid of most people. This was unusual.

Unei followed, graceful and serious as ever. Her gaze followed Chaos and his new companion and it was a little too far away to read the subtleties of her expression but Owen could swear she was smiling.

That should have been everyone, should it not? But another figure followed. This one, Owen did not recognise at all. It was a man – almost certainly, though his armour covered his entire body and twisted his silhouette into something monstrous. A giant of a man, taller even than Unei. Owen could feel something cold twist inside him, the same thing that had twisted inside him when he had first had to fight a real monster and seen its blood on his sword. The same thing that told him that he did not like interrogation training or having students and sponsors watch his medical treatments in the operating theatre or having adults tell him he was wrong about his own name. He did not like this man. He did not know why, but he did not like him.

The man was watching Chaos and his companion, too.

The gate slammed behind them.

“Take Chaos to the examination room.” Doctor Henry said calmly, and the soldiers at Owen’s side moved to follow his orders, lifting Chaos and pulling him away from the guest. The guest would not let go of his hand, though. She furrowed her brows, pointing at the guard with her free hand.

“You can’t take Mid away! He’s going to show me his house!”

Owen did not like that much, either. Children weren’t supposed to tell adults what to do. One of the soldiers snatched her wrist and pulled her hand away from Chaos’ and she yelped in shock and then a lot of things happened very, very suddenly.

The great man dashed forward with a speed that his massive size and heavy armour had not betrayed before. In seconds, his hand was around Doctor Henry’s neck, holding him up by it in the air. Doctor Henry froze in terror, and the soldiers all turned their guns on the large man.

“Your men lay a hand on her once more in my presence, and I will kill every man in this place.” He growled, before turning to the soldiers surrounding him. “Shoot, if you mean to. You think I have not felt gunfire before?”

One bullet ricocheted off his armour. Two passed through it, but the man barely flinched. Nobody else shot, either for fear of harming the doctor or for fear that it would do nothing but anger the man. From somewhere he heard a shout of horror that this must be Garland, the great knight of Cornelia.

Owen did not have a gun. He had a sword. And so he took it from his hip before anyone could stop him, swinging it at the great man over and over. He was strong, and it dented the man’s armour, but he was also small and terrified and- the man tossed Doctor Henry roughly to the ground and grabbed his wrist instead, lifting him by his sword arm. He struggled for a moment, but Garland jostled him about by his arm in response. He lowered him before pulling him up again sharply and Owen felt something in his shoulder move out of place. It burned horribly, like it had when it had been dislocated in the strength tests a few months ago, and it took all he had not to cry out at the sudden pain.

“Another child.” Garland said, pulling Owen so that their faces were very close together. Owen kicked up at the man’s helmet, sending the face plate of it flying off, and then kicked with the other leg. He could feel his boot meet flesh, but it had earned him another rough shake. He did cry out in pain this time. This wasn’t like being hurt in tests, where he knew what was coming and could avoid it by doing things right, where the doctors were careful not to damage him in ways that they could not repair. Tears were stinging the corners of his eyes, and his hand grew so weak that he had to drop his blade. He allowed himself to hang limp from his wrist, disgusted with himself for being so afraid but not daring to fight any more.

The girl was beside Garland now, not looking much braver herself. But she beat her tiny fists against Garland’s thigh.

“You’re hurting him! Stop it, now, or I shall tell mother!”

Garland dropped him to the ground immediately. He sat up, fumbling around with his wrong hand until he found the hilt of his sword, and tried to push himself to his feet to attack again. By then, though, the girl had put herself between Garland and him. Garland had a bloody nose and lip, Owen noted with just a little pride. A little way away, Chaos struggled in the arms of the soldier who was holding him as Unei stroked his hair, trying to keep him calm. Her face was still – not afraid, and not angry. Just still.

Garland turned away from them, and the girl offered a hand to help pull Owen to his feet. He looked at it for a few seconds before pushing himself up without her help.

“If word should find me that so much as a hair on my Princess’ head has been harmed, I will return.” Garland shouted. “I will return if I have to _swim here_. And when I do, I will slaughter every man and woman here who stands between me and her. I have bested both of your child-weapons now. They cannot protect you from me. Am I understood?”

Director Cid had been tending to the fallen Doctor Henry, but he stood.

“You are understood. Leave, now. I am certain you have real enemies to face, and not just doctors and children.”

Garland did leave, led out by six men with guns trained on him. One of the soldiers carried doctor Henry to the infirmary. Others took Chaos away. The girl was talking to Owen, but he couldn’t quite hear her. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything. It was only when the sound of the airship taking off signaled that Garland was on his way home that he dropped his sword, crumpling back to the ground again. He was crying and he didn’t know why, vision blurred with tears no matter how quickly he wiped them away with his good hand. The girl knelt down by him, still fussing. When he still didn’t respond, she put her arms around him and he froze.

He couldn’t move. If he did, he might hurt her, and Garland would come back.

“-s’okay. It’s okay. I’ll tell mama if he hurts you again, and she shall be very cross-”

She was trying to comfort him. He hated it. He hated her. She was the one who’d made all this happen, by talking back to an adult. And if he told her not to touch him, what would she do? Would she make Garland come back to hurt him and the doctors again? Would she find some other way to hurt everyone?

“Princess, ask one of the guards to take you to your quarters. You ought to unpack and rest. The Control Subject needs to have his injuries seen to.”

It was Director Cid who rescued him, coaxing the girl to let him go. She took Cid’s hand then, and he seemed deeply uncomfortable with this.

“I can help! I help the healers at home, when Uncle Garland is hurt.”

“I don’t want you to help.” Owen mumbled. She was doing it again, talking back, even after everything that had happened just moments ago. She didn’t care that it was wrong to do, that it was going to hurt people. She just wanted to get her way, to cause trouble. The girl looked down at him, confused. “This was all your _fault_.”

Hurt crossed over her face for a moment – Owen felt immediately both terrified and guilty - and her grip loosened. Cid used the opportunity to escape her.

“Have someone show you to your quarters, Princess.” He repeated. “Control, with me.”

He stood and followed Cid, leaving the girl alone.


	8. Aftermath

Cid didn’t usually have time for the sort of work that involved seeing Owen face to face. He did the surgeries, but Owen was always asleep for those (he had said he wanted to be awake to see what they were doing to him, but Doctor Henry had said something about that being an ‘ethical nightmare’, which he didn’t understand. Being awake should prevent nightmares). It was a shame, because Owen found that he liked Director Cid. He was the sort of person who did everything the way it should be done, from closing the door slowly so it didn’t slam to separating all his medicines by purpose and calling them by their long scientific names even when talking to him, rather than saying ‘the round one’ and such. He had reasons for everything, and he made things make sense.

“These are for the pain.” Director Cid said, placing two pills on the table in front of Owen. “And these for the swelling.”

Owen nodded. In truth, neither of those were problems right now. He couldn’t feel his shoulder at all under the sphere of ice that Cid had summoned around it, and the cold certainly must have taken down the swelling by now. With his good hand, he put the tablets in his mouth anyway, swallowing them with gulps from a cup of water.

“I’m cold.” He said. He did not normally complain, but Cid had said to tell him everything he felt.

“From the ice?”

“No. Different. Cold inside, I think?”

“That would be something we call ‘shock’. Have you experienced it before?”

He shook his head. Cid’s fountain pen scratched against a notepad. Owen felt the cold inside him spike. Was ‘shock’ a bad thing? Would he be in trouble?

“It’s perfectly normal.” It was as if Cid had read his thoughts. “Something our tests thus far have overlooked.” He reached for a binder, bringing it over to show to Owen and flicking through the pages. “Experiments on physical trauma – those are the ones where you are hurt – have always happened with your prior knowledge in the past, yes?”

He nodded, looking over the pages. He could read most of the words on their own, though seeing them in order right now made his eyes glaze over. His brain felt too heavy, even though normally he would have desperately wanted to see the inside of that binder.

“You are almost certainly experiencing shock now, and not then, because this incident happened without your expecting it. We ought to have considered that in our testing – I apologise.”

What was he being apologised to about? Was Cid sorry for not knowing that he could experience shock? Or for not forcing him to experience it sooner? He was about to think on it further when Cid stood, moving a hand over the ice on his shoulder.

“That should be long enough. I don’t think nerve damage from cold is a risk for you, but- well. We have had surprises today. Now-”

Even though he winced as Cid set his shoulder back into place, he could barely feel it. It just felt like it ought to hurt even though it didn’t, and he didn’t like people putting hands on him without his say so. He tried to move his arm about, but Cid tutted, looking him over.

“It’s a shame it was your right – we’ll have to rework your training schedule once all the fuss is over. You’ll need a sling for a week or so. Let me see- I imagine that you despite self-directed study as much as I did when I was your age.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. Was it a trap? People didn’t often ask him whether he liked his lessons, only told him that he had to do them.

“I didn’t know you when you were my age, sir. So I don’t know”

Cid smiled.

“I’ll pick out some books for you, if you would prefer the structure. They won’t be easy. And I shall expect you to study every word – I will test you. But I promise that they’ll be interesting.”

 

* * *

 

The books _were_ interesting. They were huge and complicated and difficult, but they were interesting. They were from Cid’s own library in his living quarters and written in lufenian. He devoured them, though less literally than the tooth marks in a few suggested that Chaos had tried to. The first two nights after the incident he hadn’t been able to sleep – the sling was itchy and he couldn’t find a comfortable way to lie without upsetting his shoulder and even when he finally managed to drift off into sleep he had found himself being grabbed and tossed around by a giant dark figure in his dreams. He had read instead of sleeping, and the extra time meant that he was already nearing the end of the first book, a massive text on anatomy. But now it was late morning, a few hours before lunch. He had only pushed his breakfast around the plate this morning, and hunger and sleep were catching up with him, making the book too hard and any distractions too easy and tempting.

That was when he heard the sobbing.

He hadn’t spoken to the girl – Sarah, he’d been told when his dinner had been brought to him last night, a princess from far away – since he’d gone with Cid for treatment a few days ago. He was still angry with her. Not so much because he’d been hurt, that happened a lot, but because she’d hurt him by breaking rules and talking back. Everything would have been fine if she’d just behaved herself. He’d be able to do his normal work, and Doctor Henry wouldn’t be in the infirmary still, and Chaos wouldn’t have friends when he didn’t.

Maybe not that last one. He didn’t like thinking that last one, it made him feel cruel and jealous and both of those things were even worse than Sarah’s selfishness.

And so he tried very hard not to care that she was upset. It served her right for being here and changing everything. He cared so little about it that he was knocking on her door within ten minutes.

She looked a lot different when she answered than when he’d seen her before. She wasn’t wearing boy clothes any more, but a long yellow dress. Her hair was still tied back tightly but now it was wrapped in a golden headscarf, too. But mostly, her face was different. He’d seen her excited with Chaos, and then angry, and then worried, and then hurt. But now she looked like the kind of horrible thing that lived at the bottom of the sea. She’d cried her face an angry red, with her eyes swollen from scrubbing them with her sleeves. Her nose was running all the way down her chin, and her whole face was twisted into something more comically horrible than sad. And when she opened the door and saw him she wrapped her arms around him (again. She kept doing that to people) and sobbed into his good shoulder.

“They’re not-” She hiccuped. “-not even numbers! I hate it here! Your numbers are all wrong!”

“Numbers.” Suddenly, Owen was much too confused to be angry with her. He looked about her study room. Even though she’d only been here a few days she’d decorated it more that Owen had decorated his in his whole life here. The chair and tables were pushed to one side in favour of cushions and dolls on the floor. Her work was strewn about on the floor, too. There were a few books on the shelves, but their bright colours betrayed them as far below his reading level, more like the storybooks that Unei left him than textbooks. Mostly the shelves were used for more dolls. She had a box of tea on the table, with a tin of sweets next to it and a few cups. The room smelled of cut flowers. “What’s- wrong with numbers?”

“Because they’re _not_ numbers! They’re letters! I’m not stupid, I know the difference! Everyone is trying to trick me!” She was yelling in his ear, more by accident of position than maliciously, and he looked nervously down the corridor. If she kept this up, someone would come to tell her off for being loud. And if they did, they would probably tell him off, too, for not stopping her.

He looked around again, eyes settling on her work. She’d scribbled all over it, and she was complaining about numbers-

“...Are you having trouble with your schoolwork?”

Her arms fell back to her sides. She was sheepish now, staring into an empty corner of the room.

“...do you want me to help?”

She nodded.

He closed the door behind him, kneeling down on the cushion. It didn’t even occur to him to ask if he had permission to come in or sit down – she needed help. Sarah pulled a cushion over to sit next to him, pointing at a series of questions that were not entirely obscured by angry scribbles.

“Do you have different paper to do your answers on? They will get angry if you give them this one, it’s all messy.”

Sarah looked around, eventually finding a clean piece of paper. Owen found himself judging her a little – his own study was well organised enough for the staff to find things they needed in there. She seemed to be having trouble finding even her own things. He looked at the paper again, and found himself understanding. Letters that were pretending to be numbers – she meant she was having trouble with the sums that used ‘a’ and ‘b’ and ‘x’ instead of numbers. That, though, didn’t make sense. She looked to be his age, and he had been doing that kind of work for years.

Was that why she was here? Because she wasn’t very clever? Did she get sent here to study, or to see the doctors so they could make her brain work properly?

“...um- d’you want tea? The water should still be hot.”

That felt familiar and wrong. He was in a room that smelled like cut flowers, on a soft cushion, being offered things and asked for information. He shook his head, both to clear it and to turn down the tea.

“’kay.”

“The thing is that the ‘x’ isn’t a letter. It’s just- it’s like a secret. A secret number you don’t know. And you have to learn what the secret number is-”

It was easier, once he just got started. Sarah didn’t seem to understand at first, and so he tried to help her through the problems. But even then, she struggled. It was tempting to just tell her what the answers were. Then she’d be happy, and he could go back to his interesting work and be out of here, and everything would be right. But- it was probably against the rules to do her work for her. Was that why she was here? Nobody really had problems with numbers like this, did they? (He didn’t, and the doctors didn’t. Chaos might have, but Chaos was ahead of everyone else in so many ways that it hardly mattered.)

“Oh! I have some lemon sweets from Cornelia!” She said, standing up and reaching for the tin. “Do you want one? I don’t think they have them in Onrac, Mama says it’s too far north for lemons-”

He did not take a sweet. He stood up very suddenly, backing away toward the door. Sarah tilted her head, pushing the tin toward him.

“Um- are lemons too sour for you? They’re not sour, I promise.”

He had left and closed the door soon enough that Sarah’s very confused thank you and goodbye was muffled by it.

It was a few hours later, after lunch and nearly time for dinner, when she knocked on his door.

He ignored her. He was reading, and he didn’t know if he was still angry with her or not but he didn’t like her. She was too- too everything. She reminded him of interrogation training, and she reminded him of it in what should have been a nice way, but- nothing about it was nice.

She knocked again, and then again, and then he had peace for a while.

And then there was a clatter outside.

“Princess! I- Why are you lying on the floor?!”

“’m waiting.”

He opened the door at that, seeing an assistant picking up a dropped knife and fork. Thankfully they didn’t seem to have dropped the plate. Sarah was indeed lying on the floor. Which seemed to have caused an accident of some sort. The assistant seemed a little lost for words at it. She just handed the plate and cutlery to Owen and walked off. He brought it inside without closing the door, and Sarah stuck her head in the room.

“Can I come in?”

“No.” He felt a little mean for that. But he didn’t want her in here. He didn’t like having people in his study at the best of times, when they had good reasons to be there. She didn’t have a good reason to be here and this was not the best of times.

“Um- can you come to the door, then?”

That, he obliged. The moment he was at arm’s range, he had something stuffed into his good hand. Something small and soft and- fuzzy.

“I decided this one is my least favourite, because it has a scary face. But you’re scary, too, so I thought you’d like it.”

And with that, after lying outside his room for half an hour, she just left, leaving him standing in his doorway carrying a small lion doll and trying to figure out what someone who had lived with Sir Garland could possibly mean by him being scary.

 

* * *

 

Doctor Henry was wearing a neck brace when he came back to work. It was only for a few days, he’d overheard someone saying, and he would be fine. The first thing that Owen did was to give the lion toy to him. That’s what he’d been told to do, after all, to report anything suspicious that Sarah did. And she didn’t do anything that wasn’t suspicious in his opinion, but the toy was a good start.

“We’ll look it over. Thank you.”

“And- I think her schoolwork is too hard for her.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow at that. “I’ve not seen her work, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Cornelia is a terribly-” He paused there, trying to think of a way to word that sentence. “-education there is dismal. Even for the royal family, it seems. No doubt she had trouble with modern plumbing, as well.”

(She had been, Owen realised in hindsight. He’d heard running water and cries of amazement on the first night. But then he was confused – were there places where people didn’t have taps for water? How did they get water? Was that why she was so strange, had she never had water in her life?)

With a tap, Henry straightened out a pile of papers. “You did well with the work that the Director set for you. I hadn’t intended to start you on texts of that complexity for a few years. Was it difficult?”

It was as if things were normal again, their various injuries notwithstanding. They made a new work plan for Owen, one that would focus on harder academic work and rehabilitation exercises until his arm healed. They’d order new books for him. It had already been decided years ago that he didn’t have the aptitude for black magic that Chaos possessed, but the doctor said that his quick grasp of anatomy texts might let them get permission to test him for skill in white magic, its opposite. Over and over again, though, he found his eyes drifting back to the lion doll. Try as he might, he couldn’t dismiss the nagging feeling that giving it away was cruel. He didn’t take it back. He couldn’t – not even at the end of the conversation, when he couldn’t focus for guilt - it would be against the rules now.

He found it a few days later, in one of the waste bins, cut open with all of the stuffing removed like it had been into surgery but not been sewn up again afterward. They’d checked it for something, he’d been cut open and checked enough times himself to know it.

It wasn’t the same, once it had been re-stuffed with whatever he could find. It was ugly and lumpy, with a long scar across its belly because sewing a doll wasn’t the same as field medicine. But it was whole again, and it lived in his room from then on.


	9. Lockpicks

Owen did his best to ignore Sarah after that. He didn’t want to dislike her, because she seemed nice and that would be unfair, but she was still loud and selfish and didn’t follow rules properly. Every time she spoke to him it felt as if everyone was watching him like a hawk, ready to punish him if he didn’t dismiss her properly and immediately. And she did speak to him (or rather at him, he thought, because he was learning to differentiate between the two and really very few people actually did the former). She did it constantly. Every time he told her to go away she would do so for a while and then return brighter. It became a routine thing - she would appear and bother him, ask him for help with her schoolwork or to tell her about Mr Lion’s adventures with him, and he would tell her he was busy - and that made it almost comfortable. He had made a new normal out of brushing his new neighbor off.

And so when that normal was disrupted, he didn’t like it one bit.

He had sat down to eat afternoon meal. Sarah was not an inherently punctual person, but the facility around her ran like a machine. Lunch would always come at the same time and so, by necessity rather than by her own timekeeping abilities, she would always bother him to eat with her at the same time as well. He stared at his vegetables as they cooled for a full five minutes, waiting for the knock on his door. He couldn’t start eating before she knocked, because then he would have to get up to answer the door with his mouth full. But her dinner was given to her before his, and she would always knock on his door immediately after the staff that delivered his meal was out of earshot. And so it didn’t take long for him to become both so worried and so hungry that he couldn’t stand waiting any more, and he got up to knock on her door to tell her that no, he was busy and they couldn’t eat together.

No answer. He knocked again, louder this time, trying to make it clear through the medium of knuckles on wood how displeased she had made him by breaking a routine she herself had created. No apology came. No requests for answers. Nothing. He peeked through the keyhole. No Sarah, only her food lying untouched on the table.

He didn’t investigate any further. He couldn’t - doing so would have required going into Sarah’s study and while those weren’t private, they had (at least, they had in his head) made a very strict arrangement with each other that they act as if they were. If he were to go poking around in Sarah’s study, then that would mean that she would be right to go into his whenever she pleased and bother him. No. That would not do.

He pondered over it all through his afternoon work - strength tests, the kind that had hurt him before. They were being used as rehabilitation now that he knew to stop before he injured his muscles. There was a machine that was like a scale in reverse - it had a great iron bar that he pulled, and it reported how much force he was using as if he were a great weight pulling down on it. The doctors were pleased with the results, this session. He was, Doctor Henry said, finally performing better than he had before he was injured and that was a sign that his training could return to a combat focus instead of a recovery one. This was good, because work on returning the thing that had been used for Chaos’ field test to working order would be completed sometime during this winter and he would need to be ready to be tested himself.

This, he awaited eagerly. He was nervous – he hadn’t done combat training for a long time now. What if he were out of practice? What if he failed? But far more than that, this was his chance to prove himself. He’d been asking about Garland, ever since their encounter. Most all of the soldiers had stories about him – how he’d fought alongside the elves, how he’d sunk a Pravokan battleship with a great pillar of earth through it’s middle, how he’d destroyed one of the Lufenian WarMechs alone. Half of them seemed wildly exaggerated, nobody seemed to agree on the details of them, some of the soldiers even believed that the Knight of Cornelia was a monster rather than a man. But he remembered WarMech – Chaos had defeated it, and Garland had defeated it. And so if he could defeat it as well, he would know he was good enough. Strong enough. He would know he could keep his family, as it was, safe.

Sarah was back when dinner came, and as usual she was knocking on Owen’s door before he could even think about whether or not to take a bite of his food.

“Are you busy? We ought to eat together. They gave me juice, and you can share it if you like.”

Owen was a little jealous that Sarah got to eat the same food as the facility members. Her diet wasn’t controlled nearly as strictly as his was. It make her offers to eat together more troublesome, because he really did want to share her food. But they took blood tests, and they could read his blood to know when he’d eaten things he wasn’t meant to (they’d been able to show him the spike in some chemical or other the day he’d taken a sweet from the interrogator, and he’d hated seeing it). They would know, and he would be in trouble.

“I’m busy.” He started automatically, and Sarah just nodded and sipped her juice (she was holding the glass of it in one hand, with her plate balanced precariously on the arm she’d used to knock and her cutlery balanced upon that. Surely she could have just used the tray they brought her meal on) and prepared to head back to her own living quarters. It took a few seconds more thought to add- “Wait.”

For once, for once in her life, she did as she was told and waited.

“Where were you at lunch?”

Sarah looked around to check there was nobody who could hear and then leaned in close (the plate wobbled dangerously).

“I went to visit Mid.”

And with that, she left for her own room, leaving Owen to figure out who on earth ‘Mid’ was.

 

* * *

 

It didn’t take him long. He remembered her shouting about Mid before, when she was with Chaos. That must have just been what she called him. He was too annoyed then to think much about the time that Unei had told him that Chaos had a secret real name, the way he did. He didn’t really want Sarah bothering him, but the idea of her not bothering him and bothering Chaos instead was infuriating. Everyone liked Chaos better. Unei liked him better. Director Cid liked him better. Most of the doctors preferred working on him. The only thing he did better was being well behaved, and everyone seemed to be trying to trick him into not being good.

After his lunch was brought to him the next day, Owen looked through his own keyhole. The staff member left, and a few seconds passed while their footsteps faded. And then the door across from his opened and Sarah left her room. She didn’t come to his door and knock, but instead looked about and then dashed off.

He followed her.

She moved into the courtyard, so caught up in checking for adults that she didn’t notice him following. She might not have noticed him if she was looking, because he knew how to be very quiet. She made her way through the grassy area, ducking so not to be seen from windows, until she was at the door to the staff living areas. It was locked. It was always locked. Someone must have let her in, if she’d managed to go to see Chaos. But she did not knock, which was surprising to Owen who had been under the impression that knocking on people’s doors was one of the few things she ever did right. Instead she reached into the sleeve of her winter dress – it was growing cold, by now. Winter solstice would be in a few weeks - and pulled out a few short, thin lengths of metal and put those in the lock, moving them around until something gave. He blinked. None of those pieces of metal had been the key, surely. None of them looked like the keys the staff carried. But the door had opened, so that must have meant she was allowed in.

He didn’t dare follow her, and so he returned to his lunch. But the next day she did the same thing and he challenged her.

“Do they let you in there?” He said, running over. Sarah looked a little caught off guard.

“Shh! Someone will hear!”

That was probably an answer to his question, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t be worried about someone hearing if she was following the rules.

“You can come with me, if you like. Unei’s nice, she’d let you play with Mid.”

“You’re not allowed to do that! With the metal things. And the lock. It’s a ‘security risk’.” He didn’t really know if that was true, but it sounded very convincing. He’d heard the staff talking about security risks, and he knew that locks were used to keep things secure, and so making a lock stop working was probably one of them.

“I just want to see Mid. He’s my friend, and it’s not fair that he has to stay on his own.”

Something very small and very cruel dug its teeth into Owen’s heart at that. Chaos was _lucky_. He was surrounded with the people Owen liked most in the facility, people who he only rarely got to see. Everyone liked him even though he was troublesome, he could pass every test despite not behaving himself. He probably even got nice food, like Sarah did. And he, he worked so very hard and did everything he was told and he would still not ever be half as good as Chaos was. Would it even matter if he could defeat WarMech, when Chaos had already outshone that achievement by destroying Omega? And here she was talking about what was fair.

“He’s not on his own.” His voice surprised him when it escaped his lips. He didn’t know that it could sound that harsh. “He has Unei and Director Cid with him. He doesn’t need you.”

No response. Sarah stared at him for a few seconds, and then down at the ground, and then up again at the thin metal implements in her hands. She turned, working on the lock again, mumbling something.

“-s not fair that _I_ have to stay on my own.”

The door opened and she disappeared through it and closed it behind her. He tried to follow for a moment, pushing at the door. It didn’t feel locked, but there was a weight on the other side of it, like something very small was pushing against it to keep him out. He pushed harder – he was strong, stronger than anyone here other than Chaos, and she couldn’t keep the door closed if he didn’t want her to and he wasn’t going to let her just leave him here feeling wrong when he’d not done anything against the rules-

“Control, that area is off limits. What are you doing?”

Perhaps he was not quite as good as he thought at being quiet. Doctor Henry led him back to his room. He didn’t speak much, too distracted with the sinking feeling that in ignoring his neighbor he’d been failing yet another test all this time.

Sarah didn’t knock for him that evening, nor at lunchtime or evening meal the next day. Because she didn’t knock, Owen didn’t eat more than a few mouthfuls. He couldn’t. Breaking routine made him feel too ill to keep food down. He earned a scolding for that.

 

* * *

 

By the third day, he’d let this become normal again. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was- something. He ate again, and Sarah didn’t bother him. She was there sometimes, still – he could hear her practising with that funny looking instrument she brought with her – but she didn’t come to his door. The solstice drew nearer, and with it his 84th month. Sarah received a parcel for the winter holiday, he’d seen it brought to her room, though he couldn’t have guessed at what its contents were.

Then, the night of the solstice, about a week before he was to set out to be tested against WarMech, a loud clang awoke him. It was followed by an equally loud ‘shhhhh!’. And then what sounded like a squabble.

“I ought to hold it. Uncle Garland taught me how to use a sword.”

“Mine.”

“No, _mine._ You can stay behind me, and I’ll protect you.”

One voice was Sarah’s. The other-

He opened his door to find the door to the armory unlocked. His equipment was stored in there, as were the tools used to maintain it. He wasn’t allowed in there, even though the things in there were his. And now Sarah was in there, with a thick winter coat half-covered by _his_ armour and she was stealing things from it, and at her side-

“Mid, give it back. I saw it _first._ ”

At her side was Chaos.

He stared at them, and they at him, and then he opened his mouth to speak only for Sarah to take his sword from Mid and point it at him. Unsteadily. It was far too heavy for her, he could tell by her stance even if he were still half asleep, and indignation about having people go through his things had done a good job of waking him up.

“Go back to sleep right now, else I shall knock you down.” Sarah said, sounding very much like someone who had spent a lot of time around Sir Garland and had still somehow not managed to grasp the art of sounding at all threatening. “Mid and I are going home.”


	10. Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah thinks she's the tank. She's the NPC escort, in a party consisting of the actual tank and the final boss.
> 
> Nobody corrects her.

It wasn’t so much that Sarah lowered the sword, more that the weight of the sword became too much for her, but it came to rest on the ground all the same. Owen continued to stand there in silence. He couldn’t quite bring himself to react properly, instead reciting in his head the long, long list of rules that were being broken here.

_You are not to leave your quarters after curfew except in cases of emergency._

He didn’t know why he was following them. It was just what his legs had done. He could have called for help. There was an alarm bell in the observation room, he could have rung it. Sarah couldn’t have stopped him, not really. And yet he’d just followed.

“Don’t get us caught.” Sarah said curtly, shoving his sword into his hands. “And carry this. It’s heavy. You can give it back if we find monsters, and I’ll fight them all off.”

_You are not to enter the armory unaccompanied until your training requires it._

Sarah was paying more attention to Chaos than to him. The boy seemed nervous and jumpy, more so than he always did, and she led him forward and shushed him. A massive bag hung from his shoulders, though he moved as if the weight didn’t affect him at all, and a small flame burned in his hand. One of Sarah’s headscarves was wrapped around his head, hiding his horns. Outside in the courtyard now, the night was clear but bitterly cold. He had always felt the chill less harshly than the staff had, but Sarah was wrapped up in her thick coat and he was barefoot in his nightclothes. He shivered. Chaos was shivering, too, but he was well wrapped up. It seemed more like nervousness or excitement than chill.

“It’ll be okay, Mid. You can do it. You did it before, and it was wonderful.” Sarah whispered, as a set of heavy footsteps sounded out from across the courtyard. The flame in Chaos’ hand went out, replaced by a softer light, moving around his bony fingers like gas.

“Stop right there! What-” The owner of the footsteps didn’t manage another word before he crumpled to the ground. Owen’s grip on the sword tightened and he dashed over to kneel by the man, putting himself before the fallen soldier and Sarah and Chaos.

_Under no circumstances are you to use force against any member of staff._

“What did you do-?” He began, before Sarah shushed him sternly.

“You’re going to wake him up.”

She pushed Chaos around, turning him so she could get access to the bag he was carrying and taking out a blanket to lay it over the sleeping man. Owen just stared at him. A sleep spell. He knew about things like that, he’d read about them and the doctors used them on him sometimes. He couldn’t use it himself. He’d read about it, he understood all of the theory, but the magic wouldn’t come to him. Sarah followed his gaze as she tucked the sleeping soldier in, seemingly not so desperate to escape that she’d leave someone uncovered in the cold weather.

“He’s really good at magic, isn’t he?” She said, mistaking his dumbfounded gaze for admiration. “And I’m really good at fighting. Just like Uncle Garland and the elves.”

He was about to open his mouth to disagree, but before he managed to do that Sarah was wrapping another blanket around his shoulders, tying it like a cape.

It shouldn’t have been so easy. His entire life, the great door of the facility had been impossible to breach. Nobody could come or go without permission. And yet with a few more sleep spells and those metal tools Sarah used they were in the guard house, Sarah wrapping a blanket around three guards and returning with a handful of keys. She tested them one by one on the lock that kept the gates from being raised until one worked, and Chaos (following Sarah’s instructions, of course) turned the mechanism that raised the portcullis. Owen stood in the middle of it all, feeling highly unnecessary to this process. And then, as if they should have been capable of it all along, Sarah took his hand in one hand and Chaos’ in the other and led them down the steps. She tested the keys once again at the great door until she found one that worked, and then they were out of the gates.

_You are not to leave the permitted areas unless accompanied by a member of staff._

It was colder outside. The moon seemed brighter above them than it had been inside the facility. Everything seemed more crisp, more real. Sarah led them along the path, lit by the moonlight and by Chaos’ nervous flame. Owen was beginning to wonder which of them was afraid of the dark – one of them had to be, for Chaos to be risking being seen by using that flame. It wasn’t until they were a little way away that Sarah spoke again, letting go of their hands and wrapping her arms around Chaos joyfully.

“We did it! We did it! You did _so well_ , Mid. We just need to-um.”

“East. Boat- boat in the water.” Chaos said. He was speaking more than Owen had thought that he could – the staff all claimed he didn’t speak to anyone unless Unei helped him.

“Right! East! That’s-” And Sarah paused, tracing across the stars with a finger. It was taking her a little while, and for a moment Owen felt tempted to help her out of pity. But before he could decide whether it would be better to break the rules to help her or to just watch her struggle, she seemed to find what she was looking for and pointed ahead. “This way.”

Owen continued to follow them. Chaos wouldn’t talk to him, but Sarah would. A lot. As if she’d never stopped talking to him.

“Mama sent this coat to me, for the Solstice. And- she had to send it to Onrac proper, first, so that they could look at it. But they sent it here. And they had to send it with the deliveries, on a boat.” She went on, uninvited, telling him all about coats and boats and probably her plan, somewhere along the line. “And the delivery man had to stay overnight, because he said the sea was bad. So there’s a boat that’s all by itself right now. We’re going to take it to Cornelia, and then Mid’s going to live at my house with Mama and Papa and Garland.”

He didn’t want to be included in this, he certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near Sir Garland, but he was a little upset that he wasn’t nonetheless.

“Him too.” It was Chaos who spoke up for him – still not to him, but to Sarah on his part. Sarah thought that over for a little longer than he would have liked before nodding.

“’kay.”

 

* * *

 

And that was that. For a while they continued, the frozen earth hard and cold against his bare feet. Sarah continued to talk and talk, Mid interjecting where she allowed him to and Owen following along in silence. Every now and then, Sarah would take his hand and pull him along so that he was following closer, but for the most part she would leave him be. Dread gnawed at him, colder than the evening air. For a time, he thought that it might just be the knowledge that all of this, all of it, was very very forbidden. As time passed, though, and the smell of cold salt came to flood the air as they grew closer to the sea, he began to entertain the thought that there might be something terrible out here, something almost as bad as breaking rules. He knew that there were monsters outside of his home – he’d faced them a few times now, always supervised and always with several men’s guns trained on his opponent.

He’d fallen behind again. Not too far, just far enough that Chaos’ flame didn’t quite illuminate the ground by his feet. They were mercifully numb from the cold by now, and he found himself ignoring the small stones and such of the road. What he could not ignore, though, was when he found his foot falling upon something warm and soft and slimy. He made a sound of disgust at that, the first thing he’d really said since Chaos has sent the first guard to sleep, followed by a yelp as the thing wrapped around his ankle and pulled his leg from under him.

“Monster!” He yelled. Chaos scrambled back, the flame in his hand growing in intensity to reveal the thing that had grabbed him – a great robed thing, the shape of a man but bloated and tentacled, with glistening wet skin the colour of a dark bruise. Mindflayer, he knew from the books. He pushed himself up, only to find his sword gone from where he dropped it.

And then Sarah rushed forward, having snatched the sword back when he was distracted, and stabbed at the great thing. It screeched, dark ichor staining its robes. Chaos’ flame died down again – he couldn’t launch it at the monster with Sarah between him and it.

“Get back! I- I am a knight of Cornelia!” (She wasn’t.) “I can protect you!” (She couldn’t.)

With immense effort, she pulled the sword up a little, cutting further into the monster, but couldn’t muster the strength to pull it back again. Then, without the monster moving, and with no more fanfare than a brief yip of alarm, she flew back.

Chaos was at her side immediately, but Owen wasn’t watching him now. His sword was still lodged in the monster’s torso and his body was moving toward it as his mind raced over everything he had learned on this creature. They were dangerous, often deadly. Their tentacles were strong as a man’s arms and a touch from their clawlike fingers could be fatal to the unlucky, but their true weapons were their minds. If their eyes met would take control of the bodies of their prey, moving them like puppets or leaving them unable to move on their own. He lowered his gaze, focusing it only on the sword’s handle and not on the eyes of the monster, and pulled the blade upwards and out as Sarah had tried to. He steeled himself, preparing to strike again.

And then something brilliant and horrible dashed past him, and the bitterly cold night air became unbearably hot.

He recognized the thing as Chaos only by the large pack it was still carrying, the leather of it becoming scorched from contact with his skin. His skin glowed orange with heat and was almost unbearable to look at with its brightness, but when he tried to look Owen could see it was transparent now, like living glass. He was larger now, the veins and muscles of his small body only just visible under the great glowing mass of liquid crystal that he had become, and he illuminated the entire place. He didn’t even strike the monster, it simply dissolved into ash as he approached it. Owen just stared, fingers curled tightly around the hilt of his sword as Chaos turned to look at him and the hundred thousand questions he had about this were drowned by terror.

“’m okay. ‘s okay, Mid.” A small voice said, and the moment was over. The light and heat vanished as quickly as they had come and Chaos, scorched and small with a few new burns and a little less hair and the borrowed headscarf burned away, scrambled over to Sarah. “Can’t move, but I’m okay, see? Everything’s okay.”

For a little while, Owen just stared. Chaos fussed over Sarah, propping her up against a tree and taking things out of the pack one by one to offer them to her as she continually told him she didn’t need them and claimed to be able to wiggle her fingers. A little. If you looked very carefully.

“Um-” Sarah began, then whispered something to Chaos. He whispered back. “Control-.”

Oh. He’d never told her his name. Either of his names.

“You carry me, okay? They’ll have seen all that light, so we’ll get caught if we stay here. And Mid is already carrying all the things.”

There weren’t a lot of ways to carry someone who couldn’t hold on while also carrying a sword – and after that last encounter he wouldn’t be letting go of that again. It felt remarkably incorrect to be walking around with a princess slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain, but that was the way things ended up being. Sarah didn’t seem to mind all too much, brightly going on about how this would allow her to keep a watch behind them and telling Owen to go first so that Chaos could see her. In time, the frozen earth turned to cold sand under his feet and he could hear the churning of the sea.

“Boat.” Chaos said behind him, and Owen turned to see which way he was pointing. Sure enough, there was a small dock a little way ahead and a boat tied there.

“It’s south from here. The old shrine, in Cornelia. Then a few day’s walk to home.” Sarah piped up. She’d not been visibly shaken by the encounter – the only one of the three of them not to be – but she’d been quieter since nonetheless. They’d have been spotted back there and she knew it. “Mid used to be a sailor, before he was Mid. He’ll get us there safe.”

Owen had questions about that, but he had no intention of asking now. Which was good, because he doubted anyone had any intention of answering. Chaos didn’t seem as confident in his abilities, however he had gained them, as Sarah was. He looked around at the great crashing waves and at the small boat – seaworthy, certainly, but not built for these conditions – and fidgeted.

“Come on, we need to hurry, else we’ll be caught.”

Chaos looked around once more, steeling himself, and then set off toward the boat. Owen didn’t follow, prompting Sarah to wiggle as much as her paralyzed body could manage in protest. She’d got some movement back in her arms and pressed her hands against his back, trying to make him move.

The sea was too harsh, the boat too small. Owen didn’t know how Chaos knew how to sail, or if he really did at all. Could either of them even swim? He could, but he didn’t know if Chaos or Sarah had had the same lessons. Even if she could swim, she’d drown if she fell overboard before the paralysis had worn off. What about monsters? What about the cold? What if they became lost?

The risks were too great. And- he didn’t owe them anything, least of all obedience. They weren’t in charge of him, he was just following them because that was what his legs had done.

Dropping Sarah down onto the sand (she gave a soft ‘oof’ before looking up at him in confusion), he took his sword. Sarah had said that someone would have seen the light from the thing that Chaos had become, hadn’t she? And so in order to lead people here, to put an end to all of this, he needed more light. A beacon. He raised his sword to the sky as he had been practicing, focusing his mind into the end of it and then upward. He’d never quite managed it yet in practice, but now-

_Betrayal is punishable by death._

-a great beam of light shot upward, and he had his beacon. Sarah and Chaos watched, stunned for a moment until they realized what he had done.

“Why?!”

Chaos understood first, and Owen knew this because the other boy pounced on him, going from nervous to furious in an instant. They both fell onto the sand and Owen moved his arm in front of his face to block the smaller boy’s fists. Chaos dug his teeth into his forearm, not quite breaking the skin but leaving what felt like the beginnings of a wicked bruise. Owen shoved him back, standing and grabbing the bag on the other boy’s back and trying to use it to force Chaos to turn away from him. They were both strong, though, more so than even the tough leather of the bag could stand. The already-scorched straps tore, leaving Owen holding the heavy pack. He looked at it for a second and then, realizing that even Sarah wouldn’t be fool enough to try to make the journey without supplies, tossed it as far as he could, out into the sea.

“Why? Why?” Chaos continued to shout. He had his back turned to the other boy now, and he felt himself be pushed down again, bracing himself for another flurry of punches. They didn’t come.

Sarah couldn’t stand, but she could apparently pull herself across the sand. Her hand rested on Chaos’ side.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Chaos slumped down, head in his hands. Sarah pulled herself up against him, holding him. Owen rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky, the beam of light still hanging above them, avoiding looking at the others. For a long time they stayed like that.

“It was too dangerous.” He said eventually, feeling both very guilty and very convinced that he was right – it was an odd combination. “There’s a big thing down there. Kraken, it’s called. It eats people when the sea is like this.”

“We could have done it.” Sarah said weakly. The wind had, it seemed, finally been knocked out of her sails. Without the energy she’d had before, she didn’t sound nearly as convinced of the things that came out of her mouth as she had when they’d set out. “’m not scared of any monsters. I could have fought him.”

Owen sat up. Chaos was huddled up against Sarah now, and she was shivering. He was cold, too, and poorly dressed for the weather compared to her thick coat, but the stillness from the paralysis couldn’t have helped her keep warm. Owen pulled the blanket from his shoulders and offered it to the two of them. He only half expected the peace offering to be accepted, but Sarah took it and with a little help from Chaos had it wrapped around the two of them.

“Him, too.” Chaos said quietly after a moment. He wasn’t making eye contact with Owen, but he didn’t seem angry any more. He just seemed tired.

“’kay.”

Sarah offered what room there was on her side of the blanket, and Owen waited only a moment before gladly sitting with them where it was warmer. Chaos outstretched a hand with a small flame and they all curled around it, he on one side and Owen on the other and Sarah in between them where she could be warmest. They were all cold and miserable and covered in damp sand, and they would all be in terrible trouble later, but they were all cold and miserable and covered in damp sand together.

It was another half hour before they first heard voices.

“Tell them it was my idea.” Sarah said quietly. She squeezed both of their hands. For the first time, it was comforting and not just a strange thing to do.

“Was your idea.” Chaos pointed out.

“I know but- tell them you didn’t want to do it. Say I made you do it. Say I told you to come with me, ‘cause I was scared of the monsters.”

Before either of them could answer, or ask how anyone could consider it believable that she would be afraid of anything, a bright light flooded the beach. It was a man – Owen couldn’t tell who – holding a burning torch.

“They’re here!” Director Cid’s voice called back into the shadows. “I’ve found them.”


	11. Punishment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> General warning for upsetting things happening to children for this one, if you weren't already aware of that being a theme in this fic.

The ride home was quiet. It felt longer, even by bird, than the journey here had. Owen had his own bird. Chaos shared with Sarah, for he refused to ride on his own or with anyone else in Unei’s conspicuous absence. Sarah sat at the reins, seeming only a little stiff after being given a tonic for the paralysis, with Chaos’ bony arms around her waist. Director Cid led them, and three of the guard staff took the rear behind them.

They had brought medical supplies and warm blankets, and Owen was thankful to be well wrapped up. Dawn came late this time of year, a few hours after morning bell, and so it would be some time yet before the world became warmer. He was tired and cold and his feet ached from walking barefoot across the cold ground but the blankets were soft and warm and it was only the fear that falling asleep might be mistaken for further disobedience that kept him awake.

Chaos had, in fact, fallen asleep by the time they arrived at the gates. What was, if Owen was reading her shifting about correctly, an uncomfortably tight hold on Sarah’s waist seemed to be the only thing keeping him from falling. She tugged at his arms when they reached the gates to wake him, mumbling something that either her own tiredness rendered unintelligible or that Owen’s sleepiness kept him from hearing. Much to his disappointment, they weren’t sent to bed when they arrived but instead brought to the observation room.

Less disappointingly, they were brought hot tea. Owen took the mug eagerly, warming his hands with it. Chaos was too distracted by Unei’s presence to pay much attention to his, and Sarah too distracted by trying to convince Chaos to drink his tea to drink her own. They were examined, the three of them, Sarah given another tonic for the aftereffects of the paralysis and Chaos’ new blister-like scars looked over.

“What happened here?” Doctor Henry asked, a little too tired to really be doing this, even less of a middle of the night person than he was a morning person. He pulled back the torn sleeve and looked over the conspicuously tooth-shaped bruises on Owen’s arm.

“Bit him.” Chaos said from across the room, speaking to Unei and Unei only, only to be interrupted by Sarah.

“-I bit him.” She said. “Because he didn’t want to come with me.”

Chaos looked at Sarah, then at all of the doctors looking at both him and Sarah (specifically, looking at their teeth. Their very distinctly different teeth). It took him a moment to speak, because he didn’t seem to like speaking to people. He pointed at Sarah. “She bit him.”

It was not all too convincing. Owen said nothing, because he didn’t want to lie. Doctor Henry sighed uncharacteristically deeply. “Very well.”

They asked more questions, and he let Sarah answer. He didn’t like how easily lies seemed to come out of her mouth, but the staff didn’t seem to mind too much. They seemed almost eager to take her at her word. She had broken into the armoury, she said, which was true. She had taken Owen’s sword and armour and told the forced the two of them to come with her because boys weren’t scared of monsters like she was, which was absolutely false. She had bitten Owen to make him come with them. She had forced Chaos to send the guards to sleep by threatening to bite him as well. Owen suspected that the only reason she hadn’t taken responsibility for the sleep spells entirely was how easy the lie was to prove.

“When-” Doctor Henry had asked, looking over at Director Cid. Cid looked over Chaos. “- _We_ did not teach him anything of the sort.”

“It’s been used for anaesthesia before. Must have picked it up then.” There was a note of pride in Cid’s voice, and Owen had to force back a spark of jealousy. It felt more wrong to be jealous of Chaos now, being able to see him all small and nervous and loyal to anyone he could find to be loyal to. “We ought to be careful with what magic is used in their presence in future.”

“Now, Princess.” He continued. “You left because you wanted to play out by the sea, didn’t you?”

Owen blinked in confusion at that. Sarah hadn’t said anything of the sort, and it certainly wasn’t true. Sarah seemed just as confused, because neither of them could recognise yet when they were being told what answers were expected of them.

“No, I wanted to go home.” She said, completely honestly for the first time in this questioning. There was no reason to lie about that, after all. The reason they’d left was irrelevant compared to the fact that they had. They ought to be in the same amount of trouble no matter why they had done what they did, it was only fair. “I don’t like it here. Mama and Papa and Uncle Garland and my friends aren’t here.”

Director Cid sighed. It was Doctor Henry who spoke up first, solemnly and more slowly and clearly than he Owen had ever heard him speak before. “Princess, you need to tell us you were only playing. You need to tell _everyone_ that you were only playing. Please understand that this is vitally important.”

They were asking her to lie. Telling her to lie. Owen was the one to speak up at that, because all of this was nonsense. “But that isn’t _true._ ”

“Nor, I suspect, is anything else she has said.” The doctor replied, tapping a finger upon the bite marks on his arm. He sighed again, resuming covering the marks with a thick clear ointment. “And yet, this is what we are going put in the report. I want you all to listen, and I am going to speak very slowly.”

He did speak very slowly, and Unei even make Chaos turn his head to watch and listen properly. Sarah stared up, having been shocked into silence when she realised that the doctor believed nothing she had told him. Owen listened too, of course, both because he had been told to and because he did not understand at all why his elders should _want_ to be told lies. It had always been vitally important that he told them everything and that everything he told them was true. He couldn’t understand why that would be different for Sarah.

“You are here as collateral, Princess. Please believe me, we wish you were not. We want you to be free to leave – genuinely we do. We only wish to continue our work in peace, and not to have children running about.” Owen tilted his head at that. Were he and Chaos not children? He had thought that they must be, because they were very small and had a duty to do what adults said. What else could they be?

“Then- can I go home? I want to go home. Please let me go home.” Sarah said, her voice suddenly soft and pleading and genuine.

“No. Your mother sent you here until the Prince of Elfheim wakes, as a symbol of Cornelia’s promise to keep the terms of its peace treaty. As long as they do not break those terms, you may stay here where you will be safe. If they do-” He paused, shaking his head. “I do not know how to explain this to a child-”

Director Cid took over. “Explain it as you would to an adult – she will be treated as one if they take her from here. She cannot afford for us to be softer with her than _your countrymen_ will.” The doctor turned to look at him with incredulity. Owen still did not understand – he knew that Cid and Unei came from a different place, that they were from Lufenia and not from Onrac as Doctor Henry and most of the other staff were, but didn’t see why that should be relevant. “If they do break the terms, you will be taken away to somewhere else, where your mother’s knights cannot find you. People will hurt you there until Cornelia follows its terms. If it does not, I can only imagine what they do to young girls.”

The room fell silent. Both Unei and Doctor Henry stared at the director in horror. Owen stared at Sarah instead, watching as the colour left her face and she tried to respond, trying but not quite succeeding to form words. Chaos moved first, pushing his way out of Unei’s arms and over to Sarah, putting himself between her and everyone else in the room.

“ _I do not understand what you are implying, Director._ ” The doctor began, sounding very much like he knew what the Director was implying and took great offence to it. His tone was still slow and clear, but now there was something beneath it. Something unpleasant. “But whatever it is, it is not appropriate to discuss-”

“She needs to understand.” The director snapped back, speaking about Sarah rather than to her. “She needs to understand that what we are doing here is to keep her safe, else she will continue to cause trouble.”

Doctor Henry cleared his throat, trying to walk over to Sarah. Chaos growled, but Sarah took his hand quietly and he moved to one side, standing next to her chair and allowing the doctor to approach. “Your remaining here is one of those terms, Princess. If you leave, then you will be taken away from here and Cornelia will be at war with my people. Control and Chaos and all the soldiers here will be sent to fight. Some of them will be hurt. Some of them will die. People of Cornelia and Onrac alike will suffer, and I know that you do not want that.”

“I don’t. I really don’t. I just-” Sarah seemed to be on the verge of tears now, and despite himself Owen found himself filled with the fear that Sir Garland might return at any second and punish everyone here for making her cry. But the moment passed, and Sir Garland did not return, and he didn’t understand why but that was somehow worse. He didn’t want the man here, but to know that Sarah was truly alone – that made it his family’s duty to keep Sarah safe from these other things that might hurt her. It was a task he did not think himself or Chaos equal to. Not when there was so much he didn’t understand.

“We are going to have to report this incident. You will all have to be punished. But if you tell us – us and anyone outside of this room who asks you – that you only meant to play, you can be punished as a misbehaving child and not a traitor. We want to help you, Princess. Nobody here wants you to be hurt, and nobody here wants war with Cornelia.” He turned to stare down the director, at that, and Owen didn’t quite understand why.

Another long silence followed. Doctor Henry turned to Owen, and he suddenly felt that he, as the good and cooperative one, was being expected to take the lead here.

“She wanted to play. She told me so.” He lied, and the words felt like choking up sandpaper, hurting his throat and leaving him exhausted and regretful. “She did- I heard her.”

“Told me, too.” Chaos added, speaking to the doctor for once even though he couldn’t meet his eyes.

“I did. I just wanted to play.” Sarah said, her voice quiet and defeated.

“Very well.”

The doctor fell quiet, writing down Sarah’s answer. He pulled Director Cid aside, speaking to him quietly before he left. The two of them seemed furious with each other. The director turned back to look at them all. When he did, Unei scooped Chaos up in her arms. He held on to Sarah until he was pulled away and there was no holding her any more. She managed to smile at him.

“Well then. Everyone to their quarters, now. Subjects, return to the observation room at afternoon bell.”

 

* * *

 

Owen slept fitfully, tired now beyond the point of being able to rest. Every dark shape in his room became something terrible. Until now, he had thought himself more than capable of fighting off most terrible things save for Sir Garland. But now, now there seemed to be so many others that he couldn’t face down. There was Garland, here to find Sarah gone to a place where he could not find her and with nothing left but to fulfil the oath he made when he left and kill everyone here. There was the shapeless shadow of the people who might take Sarah away – a force he didn’t know and couldn’t fight. There were all the places that they had spoken of, places that might be at war, places full of people that might be hurt. And then, though something inside him twisted against him and told him that it was wrong and cruel to fear Chaos, there was the thing that Chaos became, bright and brilliant and horrifying and dreadful. He was almost grateful when morning bell rang and he rose, limbs and head heavy, to a quiet knock at his door.

Sarah was still wearing her clothes from last night, the boyish clothing she’d worn when she first arrived. She looked exhausted.

“Do you want to eat breakfast with me?”

It wasn’t as if nothing had happened. It was as if a lot had happened, but that some things, some things at least, were as they had always been. He nodded and she reached out, holding his hand with her fingertips (and only her fingertips, he noted).

He still didn’t want anyone else going in his study if they didn’t need to, but he took his tray and followed Sarah to hers. Sarah’s study was as it was when he’d last seen it, warm and inviting and full of dolls and storybooks, with schoolwork and toys alike strewn across the floor and that thick winter coat she’d been sent by her family hung from a hook on the wall. A stringed musical instrument lay in one corner – he’d heard her practising with it but never actually seen it himself. It didn’t suit the rest of the things in here – it was old and plain beside her ornate dresses and colourful dolls. He sat on a cushion, poking at his breakfast.

They ate in silence, for the most part, insofar as they ate at all. Sarah didn’t seem to have that much more of an appetite than he did, pushing bread and cheese and fruit about her plate. It wasn’t much different from eating on his own, save for the fact that he wasn’t alone. She held everything in the same strange way she had held his hand, with only her fingertips. He noticed the cause before long – three long red and purple welts across each of her palms, like they had been struck by something long and thin.

He was clever. He knew what that meant – that there had been no marks on her hands last night and that they had been told they would be punished. He had never been given a punishment more severe than a demerit, was that what happened? It was conflicting, because at once it seemed too trivial to be a punishment – skin damage tests weren’t punishments – and yet also a terrible thing to do. The idea that someone had decided to hurt someone else to make them do what they wanted made his heart pound in his ears the way it had when Garland had attacked the staff. He forced the feeling down along with a slice of meat and a gulp of water.

There was nothing to attend to this morning, with half the staff still asleep after the upheaval last night. And so he stayed in Sarah’s study. She brought him books so he could help her with her reading, big colourful ones from Cornelia. They were so simple that he would have ignored them if left to his own devices, but she seemed to like them. They read them aloud like plays, and she told him to be the dragon so that she could read out the knight’s parts. Then they swapped, because she said he was very bad at roaring. He must have fallen asleep somewhere in between the dragon dying and the triumphant return, because when afternoon bell rang he woke on a pile of cushions, with Sarah’s big coat over him as she sat on her own, pulling faces at the book and trying to read difficult words under her breath.

“Oh.” Sarah said softly, crawling over to shake him awake. “It’s time.”

He stood, holding the coat uselessly and looking around to find where to put it, for it was too nice to just put on the floor. Sarah pointed to the hook and he hung it there.

“Mid’ll be there, let’s go see him.”

They arrived at the observation room first, being only across from it. Sarah hadn’t actually been meant to be there, but that didn’t matter as much to Owen now as it had before. Doctor Owen arrived next, bidding Owen to sit on the edge of one of the cots. He took note of Sarah’s presence and seemed to be considering asking her to leave for a moment, but instead leaned out of the door and shouted for someone to bring an extra chair into the room for her. Unei and Chaos were quick to follow, Chaos immediately running over to Sarah before being moved to one of the observation cots.

She drew her small hands into fists to hide her palms from him, and Owen looked between them anxiously. Until now, he’d been afraid that Garland might return if Sarah was hurt, and perhaps he was right to be. But after what he had seen last night, after Chaos had reduced that monster to dust for hurting her -

-He didn’t want to be afraid of Chaos. He truly didn’t, not when the other boy had shown him kindness. Director Cid entered the room along with a trolley of medicine bottles and needles. He closed the door behind him.

“Both of them are ready?” He asked. The doctor nodded, and Cid continued. “Three hours each, then.”

Remembering Sarah’s hands, Owen held out his own, hoping to prove himself good again by being willing to accept punishment. He didn’t understand what ‘three hours’ meant, but he had seen what Sarah’s punishment had been – it was just like tests, really, except that it was unnecessary. The adults looked at him in confusion, and then over to Sarah, and slowly understanding crossed their faces.

“No.” Doctor Henry said. “Not for the two of you. You need to lie back.”

He did as he was told, very confused now, and remained still as the restraints that kept him from hurting himself or the doctors during treatment were attached to hold him in place. Across the room, Chaos was also being restrained, Unei cooing and shushing as he trembled. Sarah had got up, fists still closed, and stroked his arms awkwardly with her knuckles. The doctor didn’t continue until both of them were secure, as the Director measured out medicines behind him.

“You will each receive three hours of complete sensory removal, and it will make it easier for you both to follow the rules in future.”

Owen didn’t understand what that was. He remained still – even without the restraints he would have remained still – as a needle went into his arm. Across the room, Chaos screeched and struggled - he didn't like needles, Owen knew - but it was growing more distant, quieter.

For a moment, he had thought that he was falling asleep again. But that wasn’t it – the room had just gone silent. The doctor was above him, saying something that he couldn’t hear. It was another few breaths before he realized that it wasn’t quiet, that he simply couldn’t hear. A numbness spread over his body next. He hadn’t realized how much his body ached from the running about last night until the feeling of it was gone. It was a blessing, for a little while. The taste and smell of cleaning solution in the air faded away next, and his vision last.

There was nothing.


	12. Nothing

It was strange. He should have thought that not being able to see or hear would be distressing, to not know if there was a danger somewhere outside. And yet that, at least, didn’t bother him overmuch. It was almost relaxing. The first thing to become truly distressing was something he would have never noticed to miss before this started.

He didn’t even know that the inside of his mouth had a taste before. Even if he had thought of it (for it made sense, in hindsight and he liked to think that he was clever enough to realise things that made sense if given time) he never would have guessed that that was _important_. He tied to focus on it, to make his mind properly place what combination of slight acidity and the bitter taste that came about from falling asleep after eating was missing so that he could properly dismiss it as not being worth further attention, but it was something that he had never noticed before it was gone and he couldn’t quite reconstruct it in his mind based only on the sensation of missing it.

It was his hair next. He had worn it long for as long as he had been given the choice for himself, less an aesthetic choice and more that he would rather put the extra work into keeping it clean and tied back than have someone hover about behind him with a blade to cut it short every few months. Normally it didn’t warrant his attention save for when he was brushing it in the morning. He never really noticed it brushing against the back of his neck or flyaway hairs slightly scratchy against his ears and cheeks. But now that he couldn’t feel that, he missed it. That, though, he could put together again in his mind more easily. It took more thought than he would have liked, to spend every moment describing to himself the sensation that wasn’t there, but it kept him from feeling panicked.

Then there was the weight of his body. That must have been important, because they weighed him every few days and scolded him if he hadn’t been eating enough. That was gone, which was a strange feeling. It wasn’t quite like floating in water – that was his weight being supported, not just going away entirely- but it was the closet thing he could think to compare it to. And he tried to compare it, because it was much easier to keep calm if he thought of it like swimming. Like swimming without breathing (for he knew that his lungs must be working, surely, but he had no evidence of it. He couldn’t feel this breath, nor could he hear it). Swimming without breathing was drowning, wasn’t it?

This felt a lot like drowning.

He didn’t know how long it took for his thoughts to turn strange, because there was no way to count time here. Without a heartbeat or breath to keep time by, things happened as quickly as he could think, and he could think very quickly. It didn’t take him very long at all to realize that it was silly to assume that he was still in the observation room, or that he was still in the facility, or that this would end when three hours had passed. It was silly to assume that three hours hadn’t already passed, that years hadn’t already passed, that outside of this state the facility wasn’t in ruins and all the people there gone. It was silly to assume that there even was an outside of this. What proof was there for any of that? He knew that he was thinking strange things, and what evidence was there that everything that had happened before this empty place wasn’t just another of those odd thoughts?

Oh-one. Owen. He was Owen. Probably. Maybe not. Owen had heavy limbs from tiredness and a strange taste in his mouth from falling asleep after eating. He had hair that scratched his neck and cheeks. He had a heartbeat. He had restraints on him, and he could feel them and didn’t care for the feeling of being held down even when they weren’t pulled too tight. And he- he had none of those things. There was no proof that he was Owen. He had no reason to believe that he was Owen. He could remember all he pleased, but that didn’t make those memories trustworthy. He remembered his dreams sometimes, after all, and that did not make those true.

Had there even really been a time before he was here? Or had he just forgotten for a while and made up something silly again?

And what proof did he have that he was not alone here?

As soon as that last thought crossed his mind, he could almost see again. Shadows moved about around him. Even without feeling, he knew his blood had turned cold. Something was- something was gripping at his arms and legs tightly, biting into the skin. He couldn’t move. There were whispers all around, and he couldn’t quite make them out. He could taste blood.

Whatever he was, it was going to die. He was certain of it. He tried to stay still, because the creature’s grip only grew tighter when he struggled. He should be still. He should accept this. He should be _good_.

“-resistance is higher than expected. It’s wearing off already. He’ll recover improperly at this rate. Give me-”

What a strange thing for a monster to say.

“-Oh! ‘s he awake? Hello!”

“Princess, please stay out of the way.”

There was a pinching sensation in what he thought might have been his arm once, and the room around him came into focus. He could see the ceiling of the observation room. He could feel the bedsheet beneath him, crisp and clean and starched until it could form perfect corners. Through the corner of his eye, he could see the silhouette of Doctor Henry above him, his eyes still too sensitive to the light to pick out distinct features. He was talking, and Owen tried to respond but there was something in his mouth, pressing his tongue down. And then, like an eclipse, a shadow covered his vision entirely. He blinked a few times.

“Princess, _please_.”

Sarah’s face took up the entirety of his vision, she was leaning so close over him.

“Come on, Princess. The sooner you move, the sooner I can have the restraints off.”

That compelled her to move. She clambered away, and he felt a small tug at the ties around his ankle. “I’m going to help.”

“…very well.” Doctor Henry sighed before reaching down to remove an item from Owen’s mouth. Suddenly, he could move his jaw and tongue again. They ached. He could taste blood again. “Welcome back to us, Control. I apologise for the measures we had to take while you were away.”

“You bit your tongue!” Sarah chirped, seemingly ecstatic that he’d woken. One of his legs was free, now, though he couldn’t find the strength to move it. “Everyone was worried about that, so they put a thing in your mouth.”

He didn’t reply. He didn’t have the energy. A few moments later and his wrists were free, the skin around them raw (had he been struggling against the restraints? He thought he had been still the whole time. But then- how would he have known the difference without feeling?).

He remained under observation for a while longer. Chaos was across the room from him, still asleep. Or- not asleep. Awake, but not here. Sarah had pulled her chair over to sit next to his cot, fussing over him as he shook and struggled. Owen remained very still – truly still, now, staring up at the ceiling for what felt like a terribly long time.

“All seems to be well. Return to your study. Work will resume tomorrow, the rest of today will be dedicated to recuperation.”

It took him a long time to find the energy to sit up, and then to push himself to the edge of the cot. Sarah looked over from her watch over Chaos, then ran up to try to steady him as he stumbled down, taking as much of his weight as she could. One slow, slow step at a time, they made their way back to his study.

“D’you want me to stay here?” She asked, looking at his door. It had only been this morning that he’d told her that he didn’t like people going into his space. Relief flooded over him. He didn’t know until she’d asked that that he’d not wanted to be left alone, but now it was all he could think of. He nodded. She entered and brought him over to a chair. “I’ll be back soon. I’m going to get some things.”

It was quiet, once she left, and still. He didn’t tolerate dirt or untidiness in his quarters, and so there wasn’t even dust moving through the air. Everything was put away where it ought to be. There was no evidence that anyone lived here at all. He closed his eyes and strained to listen. Sarah was in the observation room next door, letting the adults know where she would be and asking that she be told when ‘Mid’ woke up. (‘A nickname’, he heard Unei clarify for the benefit of the doctor. ‘She calls him that.’). It was quiet for a little longer after that. He heard the door to Sarah’s rooms open and close. He felt cold – was that shock again? Or perhaps it was truly just cold, the winter air was bitter and even in the heated facility lying still for three hours couldn’t have done much to keep him warm.

And then she was back, dragging a bundle of blankets and cushions and dolls behind her. Of course.

 

* * *

 

“Here.”

She was holding out the tin of hard sweets again. He shook his head, but she only pushed it forward again. “Miss Unei said so. She said she always gives Mid sweets after he wakes up from sense- sensor-”

“Sensory removal.” He corrected. His voice felt- wrong somehow. His ears didn’t register it as being his.

“That. She always gives Mid sweets after. She says it helps.”

Owen looked at the tin of sweets, not quite believing it and not particularly wanting them. Just the taste of the inside of his mouth was already overwhelming right now. The sweets would be too much, surely. He didn’t move either way, and Sarah just placed the open tin on his desk.

“Well, you can take one if you want one.”

She talked at him, after that, and his mind didn’t quite hear most of it. It was better than silence, though, to be listening to people-noises and to know he wasn’t alone. She was showing him her dolls, telling him about their names and lives and-

“Why didn’t Chaos wake up? Did they put him to sleep for longer?” Sarah looked at him, confused, and shook her head.

“It’s not been three hours yet. You woke up early. It was-fourty minutes, I think? Something about- about resistance, and- I don’t know the rest.”

Now he recognised this new cold as shock, icy and moving slowly through his veins from his fingertips toward his heart. That hadn’t been three hours. It hadn’t even been a quarter of it. There should have been _more_ , so much more. He’d failed at _being punished for failure_. Without realising he was doing it, he put his head into his hands and wove his fingers into his hair, pulling at it. He had to feel something, _something_ , else he knew he’d slip back into that nothingness.

“Please- please don’t. You’re going to hurt yourself.” Sarah said from somewhere far away, her bruised hands trying to pull his away from his hair. “Stop. Please stop. Please. If you don’t, I’ll have to tell someone, and-”

He stopped. He stopped dead. His hands fell into his lap immediately. She couldn’t tell anyone. If she did- if they heard he was doing anything wrong again-

“Open your mouth, okay?”

He did, and she took one of the sweets from the tin and put it onto his tongue, pushing his chin up to close his mouth.

“Hold it in your mouth, and- Miss Unei says to concentrate.”

It was easy to follow orders, far easier than it was to be asked what it was he wanted. So he did as he was told and tried to focus on the taste of the lemon sweet. It was sweet, almost unbearably so, much more than anything he’d been allowed to eat in a long time. And it was sour, acidic, in a way that made him want to scrunch up his face. He kept concentrating, he could feel himself holding Sarah’s hands, now, and feel the cold in him retreating. It tasted different if he moved the sweet onto different parts of his tongue, or held it in his cheek. He could control how much of the sweetness of it he could sense in that way, but even then it was still too much, too sweet and sour and bitter and everything after the period of nothing at all. Something was running down his cheeks. Was he crying? Why was he crying?

He spat the sweet out onto the floor after a few minutes, and Sarah made a face at it and scooted away to one side, still holding his hands. He’d need to clean it up later, but for now- for now he was anchored in a world where things existed. It was- better. He could breathe, and he could feel and hear himself breathing, and he still didn’t know why he was crying but he could feel that as well, and Sarah’s hands were warm and the taste of lemons was still on his tongue and-

“’m sorry, Control.” Sarah said softly. “I didn’t think-”

“Owen.” He corrected, almost without thinking. He had proof of everything else, now. There was just one thing he didn’t have evidence for. She tilted her head in thought and then nodded, and Owen knew that she didn’t understand why she was being asked to call him by name, but she seemed to understand that that was what was being asked of her.

“Owen.” She repeated. They both fell quiet. He stared at Sarah in stunned silence, watching her face.

“Can you say that again?” He asked, quietly, feeling like it was a very foolish request. Sarah blinked at him, confused, and then did as she was asked.

“Owen. That’s- that’s your proper name, isn’t it? Like everyone calls Mid ‘Chaos’, but he’s Mid. You’re Owen.”

‘ _You’re Owen.’_ It was the nicest sound he’d ever heard, nicer than songbirds or bells. Nicer even than the rare times that the staff would say he was clever or exceeding expectations. He scrubbed his eyes, nodding.

“I am.”


	13. Sarah

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long, long delay on this one. For some reason I forgot how to write, and this chapter gave me an awful lot of trouble. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but since I've written and discarded about five versions of it now I figured I should just bite the bullet and post it and move on.

“Owen.” She said again, for maybe the fourth time now. Her voice was soft and careful and full of quiet wonder as she said it, like it was a powerful secret and not just the numbers on a sign said wrong. He could feel his face soften and his limbs grow lighter, feel some sort of horrible poison he hadn’t known was there being drawn out of him.

“My name is Sarah.” She added. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“I already know who you are.”

The feeling of wonder was not quite lost, but he remembered that he was speaking to a very strange person who said and did very strange things. Sarah huffed at that.

“I know that you do, but you have to do introductions _properly_.”

“Oh. I am sorry.” He didn’t quite feel like he had done anything wrong, but he didn’t know for sure. He’d never done an introduction before – he’d always known everyone here. Even when strangers came, they already knew who he was. She smiled and took his hand again, sitting on the floor next to his chair. She didn’t talk a lot and he was too tired, and still not quite aware enough of the kinds of things that one talks about, to do so himself. But she was there, and he was glad for it.

Because she was a lot like he and Chaos, if he thought about it. She was a girl, and she had nicer clothes, and they gave her different food and lessons and punishments. But she was here for the same reason as them. They had a duty to become strong, so that they could serve Onrac and protect the people here. And she had a duty to protect the people of Onrac as well, by keeping war from starting in the first place. As long as her presence prevented war from breaking out, then the two of them would only ever have to fight monsters, and never people, and he didn’t care for fighting people. Now that he understood why she was here, now that she understood why she was here, now that all of it made sense – it was right that she be here, even if she was strange and disruptive. Even if she didn’t want to be here.

There was a thump from the next room and a loud cry, followed by the sound of staff shouting to each other and something metal falling on the ground. Owen flinched at the sudden noise, but Sarah’s face lit up and she pulled herself to her feet.

“Oh, Mid’s awake!”

She stepped forward and then stopped and looked back. He stared at her for a few seconds before understanding why she’d stopped – he hadn’t let go of her hand. Even after he noticed, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“Um. I need to go see Mid. But I’ll be back soon, okay? I promise.”

He let go, and she waved as she left. He got unsteadily to his feet, half-considering following her, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go back into the observation room so soon. He cleaned up instead, moving all of her blankets and dolls and cushions into a pile in one corner so they could easily be taken away, discarding the sweet that he’d spat out and putting his desk and chairs back in order. And he listened. The walls were too thick to catch much of the fuss next door, sharp as his hearing was. The doctors were talking about something he might not have understood even had he heard them properly, and Unei was saying something soft, and he could hear Sarah’s voice chirping every now and then. Chaos- Mid had fallen quiet. Everything had fallen quiet.

Listening had grown difficult. Standing had grown difficult. He didn’t feel like he ought to be tired at all, all he had done was lie down for a little while and try a sweet and talk to Sarah. But his limbs, so light only a little while ago, felt like lead. He returned to his chair, leaning his head on his desk, just resting for a little while.

It was dark when he awoke, from dreams that he didn’t quite remember but that, comfortingly, had absolutely contained things and not the nothing at all from earlier. And a lot of things were wrong. First of all, he wasn’t in his bed but at his desk, which was not a place for sleeping. Second of all, it was past curfew and he had woken up, despite his long record for good sleeping patterns. And third of all, someone was in the room. He could feel it. He stayed still for a few minutes, waiting for them to move so that he could catch them off guard if they came closer. They didn’t. He wasn’t allowed a weapon in his quarters, even a training one, and so he reached for the closest and next best thing – a long metal ruler and spun around.

It was Sarah, having apparently managed to go a full half day before breaking curfew and going about wandering other people’s rooms at night. She snored quietly, completely unaware of the attempted ruler-attack, curled up in the pile of her things that he’d made earlier like a bird in a nest.

She was really a very strange person. But she’d promised she would come back, and he supposed that it made sense that she’d done it.

He put the ruler away and carefully, quietly, not wanting to wake her, went to bed properly.

 

* * *

 

Cid of the Lufaine, the culmination of countless generations of brilliance, who could recall the events of a thousand years past, had far better things to do than to rummage through shelves of stuffed animals, but here he was. Lockpicks hidden in the moogle doll. Nothing else so far. It would be obvious they had been here if he damaged the toys, and so he couldn’t simply cut them open. And so he squeezed at a chocobo, feeling for any objects hidden inside it. It contained a bladder of air that made a squeaking noise, but nothing else. This was below him.

It was frustrating, but convenient, that even after the day’s events the princess had once again left her rooms after curfew. Her room needed to be searched, and her absence made that easier. He picked up an envelope, one sent to her recently. It would have gone through Onrac’s military to make it here, and they seemed to trust that it only contained sheet music – he would need to look over it for hidden messages. If he could find something that they had missed…

And then his eyes fell upon the lute.

It was a humble thing, almost at odds with everything else that the princess kept here. It was clean and well kept, but its age still showed. Plain. Parts of it had been repaired, leaving new wood not quite matching old wood like scars. He dropped a knitted cactuar to the ground.

Silently, reverently, he reached out a hand to touch the thing, swallowing. Rage and joy mingled in his mind – did the Cornelians have _no idea_ what they had sent into their enemy’s lands? And- did their captors have no idea what they had laid before him? He ran his fingers over the smooth wood – he had had plans before, but now he had a guarantee. He had the lute of Sarah the Blessed, the queen who had sung for herself a hundred thousand second chances until fate dealt her the hand she wanted. Who had sung away every failed harvest, every shake of the earth, every instance of poor fortune.

His fingers brushed over the strings. They made no sound. That was all the confirmation he needed. What other instrument would only play for the royal family of Cornelia?

His heart had not been this light in years, not since he had succeeded in arguing the need for his control subject. He was almost giddy as he replaced the dolls upon the shelves, taking pains to put them where they had been before even though it seemed unlikely that the princess would notice anything amiss in this untidy study.

 

* * *

 

Owen woke to the sound of Sarah being scolded, not for leaving her room at night - the assistant seemed to think that she had come here early to eat breakfast – but for wearing the same clothes two days straight. Which was, in Owen’s opinion, fair enough. Especially taking into account that she’d also worn them two nights straight. Two trays of breakfast had been left in his study when he entered it, and Sarah had been told she could return and eat once she was washed and dressed properly.

Their breakfasts were similar, today, save for that his serving of thick porridge was larger and didn’t have the spoonful of honey that was stirred into Sarah’s. She had juice instead of milk and no medicine had been left for her. Perhaps, he supposed, she took her own medicine while washing. She returned, before long, just as he was finishing with his own medicines, and they ate.

“D’you want to do lessons together?” She asked between mouthfuls. Owen looked down at his timetable for the day. In truth, he did – he still didn’t feel quite safe from falling back into that nothing if he was alone. But at the same time, he wouldn’t be alone. And the work leading up to the test against WarMech would be less than compatible with her schoolwork (which, as far as he was aware, did not involve swords or tests of speed and strength, or studies of white magic. For the most part it seemed to involve basic algebra, playing songs and drawing pictures). He shook his head.

“No.”

“Oh-”

She seemed confused? Hurt? Taken aback? It was difficult to tell, but he could at least tell that she didn’t like the short answer. He tried again, pointing to the timetable papers.

“I can’t. My lessons are different.”

“Oh! I see.”

That was better. He took note of that – he needed to explain things to her. Everyone else here knew everything there was to know, it seemed, and so short answers sufficed unless he was giving them new information. Anything more would be wasting their time, and they would grow irritated. Sarah was the opposite. She had a lot of time and didn’t seem to know very much at all.

“Mid has different lessons, too. They’re harder than mine, I don’t understand any of them.”

He considered agreeing that she didn’t seem to understand much at all, but somehow that seemed like the incorrect thing to say, no matter how truthful it was.

“We don’t have music lessons.” He volunteered eventually. “Those would be harder for us.”

That was the correct thing to say. He could tell, because Sarah’s face brightened as he said it. He remembered her crying before and found himself wondering if it was painful, to not know things. He wondered how it would feel if he failed his knowledge tests as badly as Sarah would if she took them, and a weight settled in his stomach. It probably hurt to not be very clever, didn’t it? And to have the things that you were clever at not mean anything, because there were no tests on singing songs.

She nodded eagerly, seemingly overjoyed to hear it. “Mid says that, too.”

He wondered if he and Mid were the only people since she had come here to say that she was good for something, and then before he had even really thought about it he was speaking.

“I won’t be allowed distractions, I have a test soon. But once it’s over- for lessons that are just reading, I think it would be all right to do them together.”

Sarah nodded again, and she had agreed before his mind caught up entirely with the offer he had made. They finished breakfast without incident, Sarah’s mood too bright now to be dampened even when he did say the wrong things, and Sarah went back to her study and he to his own business.

The punishment meant that his preparation for the test against WerMech was thrown off-schedule. Only by a day, yes, but with the test a week away a day was a lot of time. He threw himself into the preparation with all that he had. It was refreshing, after the last two days, to be able to push everything else from his mind of focus himself entirely on trying to cast protect reliably, on blocking blows from any angle with his shield, on learning all there was to know on WarMech’s workings. He didn’t need to think about Sarah or Mid (and his mind slipped back to calling him Chaos, now that he didn’t have to think) or the nothing or anything at all that wasn’t relevant to the upcoming test. He slept well that night, in the way one only can by spending the whole day hard at work.

He saw Sarah at breakfast and dinner, and there she would talk to him about near enough everything under the sun. Most things he knew more about, but there were some things she understood better than he did. She complained that her sheet music had gone missing, but bragged about having memorized it all by heart anyway. She told him about the secret lives of all her dolls, their names and the kind of things they liked. She told him that she thought that he and Mid were brothers, which meant two people who had the same mama and papa, and that that mama and papa were Unei and Cid. He wasn’t quite sure that was true. He didn’t have a mama and papa or brothers or anything like that, he just had a family and just like they didn’t need his secret name, he didn’t need specific words for them.

He did not see anything of Mid or Unei, but in the time leading up to the test, he spent time with Director Cid, and he was happy about that. The director told him about WarMech and helped him with his magic. He made conversation, as well, asking him how he was doing and about his studies, and Owen thought a little more about what Sarah had said before dismissing it once again.

And he asked about Sarah. This was unusual. Most of the staff didn’t speak about her much unless she was breaking a rule of some sort. He wanted to know about her music practice, about whether she played that stringed instrument in her room. Owen told him everything he knew, of course, that she played it every day and that he could hear her through the walls. How it was pretty, but that it sometimes woke him up if she played early in the morning. How she had lost her sheet music but remembered how to play anyway. And, remembering how much it meant to her, he made a point of-

“-She is better at singing than me. Better than Chaos, even.”

It was the highest praise he could think of to give, because it was hard to be better than Chaos at anything at all. Cid smiled, thanking him for the conversation, and returned to correcting his casting technique.


	14. Song

“Hello!”

Cid looked over the girl before him. Tall for her age, wrapped in a thick coat against the winter’s chill even indoors – it must be cold for a Cornelian, this far north. She clambered up onto the chair opposite him without being invited to, placing her hands in her lap delicately – the picture of propriety in some ways and of a child who hadn’t learned her manners yet in others.

He hadn’t truly spoken to a Cornelian since he’d last seen Lukahn, before he had been brought here, and the man had been away from his homeland so long that he hardly counted.

“Princess. You have been asking after the test subject, have you not?”

She tilted her head. “I don’t think I have? I’d sooner not have tests on more subjects. I think I have enough.”

He sighed. “No, the _test subject._ ” Her expression was blank. “The staff call it ‘Chaos’.”

“Oh!” Now her face lit up with recognition. “You mean Mid! Yes, I was asking for him. I want to see him. He wasn’t happy when I last saw him, after all the- um.” She fidgeted a little. Cid found himself pinching the bridge of his nose at the mention of the name that his wife insisted on using for the test. Had she been calling him by that all the time in Cornelia? That would explain why the girl kept calling him by it. “-I didn’t mean to get him in trouble. I’m sorry I was bad. Can I see him again, if I promise to be good? And-um- Control! Control should be allowed to see him, too.”

He listened until she was done. Truthfully, he hadn’t needed to bring her here to explain her concerns, she’d been making them more than clear to everyone she had the chance to talk to. But there were tests to be done, ones quite separate from his work on the subjects, and those tests required her cooperation. And- it would not _hurt_ the test subject to spend more time around a child- it seemed to have done no harm to the control. He brought the top of a pen to his chin in thought.

“The control subject has a test in two days, you are aware?” She nodded, and he continued. “Should he pass, I think that we can safely say that both of them are ready to be exposed to one another.”

“Um- that means that Mid would be able to play with us?”

“It does.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

The girl was hugging him, having clambered over the desk to reach him, and he sighed. He had heard that the General of Cornelia’s army had taken it upon himself to manage the girl’s education. He had clearly not prioritized etiquette. Princesses ought not be going about hugging people. It was not proper. He endured, and she eventually let go. She didn’t return to her seat, instead waving and setting off to leave the room, seemingly considering her business here done now she had what she wanted.

“Princess.” She stopped, turning. “Only if he passes. And-”

“-Oh, I know he will.” She was grinning, now, as she interrupted. “He’s very clever.”

“-And you could help him, if you wanted.”

That got her attention. In silence she walked back to the chair, climbing back into it and sitting properly, waiting for him to continue.

“It is a Cornelian tradition, is it not, to sing victory songs even while their soldiers are away at war?” He asked. The girl nodded, quieter now. They were speaking in whispers, as if she knew that this was not something proper.

“Papa says it- it’s so that all the good luck knows where to go. Else the victory might go to the wrong people by mistake, it might not find the people who need it. Sir Garland says he doesn’t believe in it, but Mama says she sings for him every time he leaves and she says it works. It’s why he’s so strong.”

He listened. Properly this time. The Cornelians sang and told stories. They had sung since the beginning of time, and they sang until the things that they sang of became true. They sang the stories of heroes until heroes arrived, and then they sang the deeds of those heroes until those deeds were done. It was hard to tell where superstition and inspiration ended and the true magic began, even for him. For them, they must have seemed one and the same.

“Would you sing for the control subject? The test will be difficult, and dangerous, and you could help.”

His little co-conspiritor nodded. They spoke a little more, but she was eager to leave now. All full of purpose, determined to practice. She thanked him again as she left.

He buried himself in his work again after that. There was still a lot to be done, and he couldn’t allow his new goals keep him from his existing work, lest he arouse suspicion. The hours passed quickly and it was late when he found himself back at his home. The test subject- Chaos- _Mid_ lay asleep by the fire, wrapped in blankets with his head on a cushion. His wife leafed through a book. It was- pleasant, almost, if one could forget their circumstances.

Cid could forget nothing.

“You will be going with the control subject?” He asked. Unei looked up, holding a finger between the pages of her book as she closed it.

“Mid and I, yes. To extract him if necessary. It is a battle situation, so Mid will be- delicate. My presence will not be negotiable.”

Which meant, of course, that Cid could not be there. The two of them were not permitted to leave the facility at the same time. He would have to trust his wife.

“Will they allow you access to the WarMech?”

“I imagine so, they had me enable the thing last time. I do not see why they would not do so again.” She reached for a bookmark now, marking her page and setting the book aside. “And you are not asking for curiosity's sake, are you?”

 

* * *

 

Owen was not nervous. He absolutely, absolutely could not be nervous, because if he was nervous then he wouldn’t be able to rest properly. If he couldn’t rest properly now, if he couldn’t sleep properly later, then he would be poorly rested tomorrow. If he was poorly rested tomorrow, is performance would suffer. He would stumble, or be caught off guard or distracted, or simply not be strong enough. If his performance suffered, then WarMech would get the better of him. If WarMech got the better of him, he would fail. He could not fail, and so he could not be nervous, and so he was not nervous in the slightest.

He had jabbed this carrot with his fork sixty seven times, if he had counted correctly, and he always counted correctly. Because- he must have had some reason. It would be easier to digest, he supposed, now that it had been reduced to a collection of tiny orange pieces. He wasn’t prone to an offended stomach, but it was best to be safe. It made sense. He made sense. He was doing sensible things, and he was not afraid and-

-Sarah wasn’t eating her food, and that was easier to think about than it was to convince himself that he was destroying his vegetables instead of eating them for some reason other than nervousness.

“Have you lost something?” He asked, because he couldn’t see any other reason for her to be going about the study so desperately, looking under dolls and cushions and opening books to shake any loose papers out from inside them. She nodded.

“My music, I told you before. It’s- it’s paper, with lines on it. And inside the lines are dots, and the dots have lines on them and-”

He tried to picture it in his head. Dots with lines- something like a map of the stars, maybe, with the constellations marked out. That seemed like the kind of thing Sarah’s playing would be, if it were put to paper. “Oh- I thought- can’t you play without it?”

“I-” And Sarah suddenly seemed sheepish. She’d bragged earlier that she knew all of her songs by heart, but perhaps she wasn’t so confident in that as she liked to act. “-I probably can. But it’s _important_. I don’t want to make a mistake.”

He helped her look, both because he didn’t want her to be upset and because it was much easier to not be nervous while looking for things than it was to not be nervous while sitting down and eating. Both of their meals were cold by the time she slumped to the ground in defeat. “It’s not here. It’s really not here.”

She went quiet after that, returning to the pair of plates in defeat and eating her vegetables even though they had gone cold and a little soggy. He finished his meal as well, having forgotten entirely that he was meant to be not-nervous when faced with his friend’s distress, and stacked their dishes neatly while she stared at the floor, tugging at the hem of her dress.

“Can you make more?” He asked. It didn’t seem like it should be possible, to just put music onto a paper, but if it wasn’t here then there wasn’t really another option. “I’ll help.”

She looked up at him, blinking slowly, and then back at the floor in thought. Thought was better than despair. Then she stood, once again rushing about. She produced paper, a pen and a ruler and pushed all else on her desk to one side. Including the plates, which Owen caught. He watched as she drew long lines across the paper in sets of five. Then she brought over that great stringed instrument of hers, clearly made for someone who was far larger than she, and pushed the pen into his hands.

“Um- it’s like writing, only you always use circles, and it’s how high up the circles are that makes the notes- those are like letters. Just- just draw circles. Wherever you please. And I’ll play, so you can see how they sound.”

He froze. He had said that he would help, but now- now this seemed like a task that he was not equal to. Though he knew that the paper in front of him was replaceable – he had seen Sarah put down the lines, it had been the work of seconds – it suddenly felt as if should he place a note wrongly he would be destroying something beautiful. And Sarah- Sarah just stared at him expectantly, as if this should be something easy. Suddenly he understood very keenly how his friend felt when faced with their schoolwork. After what seemed like an age, he carefully placed the pen down, leaving a black mark between the second and third lines.

A single note came from the lute. Sarah smiled. He had- done it? He had done it.

“That’s C.” She said, and he looked at the dot. So they were like letters, just as she had said. And he could write. He could write normally and in Lufenian. So he should be able to write in music as well, surely. Less nervous, he placed a second note down. He’d meant to place it between the first and second lines, but his hand wasn’t as steady as he would have liked. It sat on top of the first line, and he looked at Sarah nervously – was that right? Was that something that was allowed?

To his relief, she played another note.

“F.”

The next, just above the last one, was apparently a ‘G’. With that, he found himself understanding the music language a little better. Each line and space was a letter. He placed another C, and then, now more curious than worried, placed another note a full line’s height higher than the G.

“So that would be I?” He asked. Sarah played the note – a high one – but shook her head.

“B. It stops at G, and then starts again. There’s not many letters in music.”

He found himself bracing himself for a feeling that didn’t come. He’d failed. He’d not understood how it worked, and he’d tried anyway, and he’d been wrong and- and she had still played the note. Nothing had gone wrong. It had been the same as when he hadn’t tried to guess, save for that Sarah had explained better. And if he’d succeeded, all that would have been different would be that Sarah wouldn’t have needed to explain. All that had been ‘lost’ was that Sarah had talked more, and he suspected that Sarah didn’t mind talking, since she did it so often and enthusiastically of her own volition.

It was pleasant.

They continued like this for some time, him putting down a note and her playing it. Every now and then she would play out what he had written and he would listen in amazement, enchanted by the way dots on a page became sound. The dark circles he had been making were short sounds. Ones that just had an outline were longer. They had tails, and ones that had a tail upon their tail were shorter, and ones with more tails shorter still. Some of them would join to each other. The more he learned, the more he got the feeling that understanding of this odd language was beyond him right now, but for once that didn’t matter too much. This was Sarah’s world, and he didn’t need to understand every detail of it. He just needed to be here, on the edge of it, and let her be the one who knew everything for once.

She took control after a while, once she had turned what he did into a melody of sorts and his random selection of notes ceased to be productive. It was a simple tune she had, by the end of it, but he was proud nonetheless. It was late by the time they finished. His rooms were dark when he returned to them, for he had not been in them to light candles as the sun set. He was glad that he kept his things tidy enough that he could navigate by memory alone without risk of tripping or stepping on something. Sarah continued to practice after he had left, and he listened to the distant sound of the song taking shape, too proud to be part of something so pretty that it did not even occur to him that he should be feeling not-nervous. It was only when he heard the quiet sound of her being reprimanded for staying up so late and she stopped and the silence washed over him that the dread set in.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would face WarMech.


	15. and she was singing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is going to be a little all over the place as I experiment with ways to express time loop fuckery via text. Apologies if this little experiment doesn't work well, and please be grateful I didn't go with my first draft in which this chapter was a choose your own adventure.

He must have fallen asleep eventually, because he awoke, and that was something that was difficult to do if one did not sleep in the first place. It was before first light and before morning bell and most days he would have perhaps chosen to go back to sleep – wakefulness too late or too early would be a black mark on his record of a good sleep schedule. But this week – this week was already lost, as far as that went. And today was different. Aided as it was by adrenaline, consciousness would not let its cold grip on his mind loosen. Better to make use of the time than lie awake and try not to think too much.

He lit a candle and took one of Cid’s books, pouring over the words.

He knew what was going to happen. He could remember what was going to happen, even though it hadn’t happened yet.

He could hear her singing.

 

* * *

 

He awoke upon a litter, strapped to two strong chocobos and pulled as a sled might be across the frozen ground. Chaos- Mid’s face was above him, taking up the whole of his view in the same way that Sarah’s had when he awoke from the punishment a few days ago. Unei rode alongside them. Everything ached, whether from injury or overexertion he couldn’t tell. Not without moving, and moving seemed difficult right now. There was something strange at his left side, reflecting the afternoon sunlight upon its smooth facets and sharp edges. A crystal of some sort.

“Awake. Awake?” Mid repeated, voice full of concern, and then as Owen blinked and slowly tried to nod- “Awake!”

Mid moved to sit by his side, facing forward. He was quiet after that, save for the odd concerned ‘Awake, still?’ whenever his breathing became too slow or his eyes drifted shut. The pain wasn’t too overwhelming, and so staying awake was difficult. But he tried, because he’d already failed against WarMech (he didn’t remember it clearly but he must have, for he would have remembered winning, surely). He couldn’t fail to stay awake as well.

And yet, the familiar terror that accompanied failure didn’t come to him. Very little did, other than the distant aching of his body. He was cold, but it was different from the cold of the winter months. It was different from shock, as well. He tried to piece together what must have happened. Mid must have extracted him from the battle, though the telltale smell of burning that had accompanied his battle with the Mindflayer before was absent. Perhaps it had been blown away by the winter air, else perhaps it was present and just beyond his senses right now.

What would happen now? He might be allowed to take the test again. That would be good. He’d heard the adults talk about the incinerator, before, where the failures had gone. Where Mid might have to go if his behavioural issues proved too dangerous. But he- he was good. Perhaps he’d get another chance, because he always did what he was told. And if he didn’t-

-it was hard to be afraid right now. It was hard to be anything. His head was too light. He was thinking too slowly – he could tell by how quickly the clouds moved above him. Perhaps Sarah would be sad, if he went away. But then, she struggled with her schoolwork so much. Perhaps she would go to the incinerator as well, sooner or later.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. The failures that had been disposed of – they provided useful data. Maybe he and Sarah could provide useful data, as well. It would be nice, to have been useful.

He looked at the crystal again, watching the light dance across its surface. It was strange that it was there, because they hadn’t brought any such thing with them. And if they had, it was odd that they should put it next to him rather than carrying it about. It could fall off the litter, surely, if it weren’t attached to anything and they went over a bump. And it was strange that it was where it was on the litter, just below his elbow. Really, his arm should have been there. Instead there was this clear crystal, growing out of his elbow as if he were made of ice instead of flesh, poking through his sleeve.

Mid’s hand was in his hair, stroking it in what he supposed must be an attempt at comfort.

“She’s singing.” He said, and Owen wondered what that meant

 

* * *

 

He wasn’t on a litter coming home, he was already here and it was still before dawn. There was a scrape and a click as a key turned in a lock. The armoury was being unlocked. He was allowed to outfit himself for the test. And- something had happened, just before, but he couldn’t remember what. Sarah was awake, he could hear her singing through her door as he wrapped padding and metal around himself. He measured the speed of his thoughts against that of her playing, and he wasn’t entirely sure why he did that, but he found it comforting that all was normal. The nervousness was gone, now, so far as he was willing to admit it had ever been there. In its place was calm, and he recited the steps of arming himself in his mind as he tightened fastenings and tested how easily he could move. Before he set out, he knocked on Sarah’s door.

They wouldn’t send her to the incinerator, surely. She was important, and she was doing her job no matter whether she did well at her schoolwork, and he would help her with that work if she needed it, and- he couldn’t quite place when that thought had entered his mind in the first place.

“Good luck!” She said, bright as ever, as she opened the door for him. “I’ll do my best!”

No, she told him to do his best, surely. It didn’t make any sense at all the other way around.

 

* * *

 

“Evacuate!” That was Unei’s voice. He turned in its direction, though he knew the order was not meant for him. “Activation procedures will take 300 seconds. All staff-”

“All staff, fall back to fifty metres.” Another voice shouted over hers. It was one of the guard, taking charge.

Owen looked up at the collection of metal as it raised itself to its full height. He could hear his heartbeat, feel it all the way through his bones. His knuckles pulled tighter about the handle of his sword with every beat.

“No.” Unei’s voice was soft, even when shouting, but he could hear it clearly over everything. “Retreat to two hundred metres. Prepare to send out Chaos if necessary.”

That was unexpected. They had done drills for this before. WarMech’s long range weapons had a range of fifty metres. Owen’s mind raced. Two hundred metres was familiar – it was the range of the Atomize program. But that- that had been deactivated in all models, after its inability to determine between friend and foe led to a great number of lufenian casualties. He’d read every book Cid would let him borrow on the WarMech, and- they had to call off the test, surely. This wasn’t what he’d trained for. People would be hurt.

“The test will begin in 250 seconds. All staff, evacuate.”

Unei knew. She had to know, didn’t she? Why would she not call off the test? He turned to look at her, but she was already leaving and he was alone in the shadow of the great metal monster. But he wasn’t really alone, was he? Because somewhere, Sarah was singing.

 

* * *

 

And then he was gone in the great beam of light. The first had hurt, and the second and third had been unbearable. The fourth dull and distant, and this, the fifth- It was painless but strange, to just dissolve like that, and Sarah was singing.

 

* * *

 

“We don’t take orders from you, Lufenian. I don’t know what tricks you mean to play, but we stay here, and you with us.”

“Please, please.” It had been two hundred and ninety three seconds. “You have to- we need to get to a safe distance.”

Two hundred and ninety eight, now. A soft light shone over everything, and it grew brighter and brighter and then-

-then it was gone, and there was only himself and Mid and the machine. He could feel his sword crumbling into rust. The staff, the flora of the area, the birds in the sky, they were gone with the light. Everything was gone. But Sarah would still be there, at the facility, waiting and singing.

 

* * *

 

It hurt.

She was singing.

 

* * *

 

He could hear still, a little. Something about ‘beyond repair’. Something about a waste of years of work.

He could hear, and he could guess what it meant.

Something about dissection.

And singing. They had to pass Sarah’s room to reach the operating theatre. A hiccup here, a sniff there, but she was still singing. Still singing.

 

* * *

 

And singing.

 

* * *

 

And singing.

 

* * *

 

Mid didn’t speak much. He never did, not so far as Owen had ever seen, though from what Sarah told him he got the impression that the other boy spoke more freely when she was the only one there. It might have hurt a little to know that Mid didn’t trust him entirely if not for the fact that he knew full well that he hadn’t done much to earn his trust.

And so he knew it meant a lot when he heard Mid’s voice – not just speaking to him, but speaking _for_ him, to the staff who were approaching.

“Unfair. Unfair!”

“Dear, I-” That was Unei’s voice, soft and calm and- even though he could feel betrayal stabbing into his stomach, he couldn’t bring himself to resent her. He had _won_. Maybe she knew- she must have known, surely. She must have wanted to give him a chance to prove himself. She lifted Mid into her arms and he didn’t thrash about but he continued his complaints. “-don’t fuss. He passed, let him have his moment.”

“I – stone me, I never thought I’d say this – I agree with the monster.” That voice was rough. One of the soldiers. The one who’d ordered the evacuation before (had an evacuation been ordered before? It seemed so long ago). “You owe an explanation, Lufenian.”

“I have none to give you. I saw that the weapon was modified, nothing more. Look among the repair team, they must have made a mistake.”

They were arguing. Owen tried to listen, but he was very tired. He sat down. It was hard to keep track of what had happened and what hadn’t. He checked his arm first – still there, but with fingers bent in a way they oughtn’t be and not doing as he asked them to. He could feel something – blood, he expected, as it trickled down this face and neck and soaked into the padding he wore under his armour. His breastplate was bent inward in a way that left very little room for him to be inside it, and he suspected this was why breathing hurt.

Something settled over his shoulders. It was a blanket – a thin one, but still warm.

“I don’t know what happened, but you did well. Congratulations.” Doctor Henry said. Mid wriggled free from Unei’s arms to run to his side but did nothing else, watching the Doctor carefully as he wrapped a bandage around Owen’s head. “Are you ready to go back?”

Owen nodded.

 

* * *

 

“It’s okay.” He said, tugging the blanket around himself tighter. “I won, still. So it’s okay.”

The cold had made itself known, now that adrenaline had let go of him. He arranged the blanket so that there was no way that the wind could get into it and pulled himself closer to Mid. It wasn’t safe for him to be riding a chocobo in his state, so he had been put on the litter. Mid was safe to ride a chocobo, but had sat with him anyway. After the great argument between Unei and the other staff, nobody really had the energy to tell him not to do as he wished. Owen was glad for the company, strange company as it was. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts right now, because his thoughts were strange and all in the wrong order. He remembered things that hadn’t happened. He forgot things that had. It was all very strange. Was he damaged? Had WarMech damaged him, somehow, more deeply than the visible injuries he had taken?

“Still unfair.” Mid was hard to converse with, but right now he seemed to want to talk. He wanted to be heard. “Different- Was different, for me. Easier. For you, was harder. Is not- It is not right.”

“I won, though, so-” He repeated. He didn’t like to feel like things might be unfair. If they were, it would be his duty to complain, but to complain would be bad behaviour. It would be a difficult position to be in.

“I should have harder test. Older protects younger. Sarah says so.”

Sarah had, it seemed, told Mid a lot of things. That Mid, despite being the smallest of them, was older than him and so had to look after him. And that she, being just a little older than Mid, had to look after him. It was strange to think of Sarah as the oldest and just as strange to think of himself as the youngest.

They arrived at the facility after dark. He was exhausted by now, barely managing to keep his eyes open. Mid had fallen asleep eventually and Owen hadn’t bothered to wake him, too tired to keep talking in circles around whether the test was fair and whether it mattered. Director Cid was there, helping him stand, supporting him as he walked to the observation room. Sarah was still singing. They stopped before her door and the director knocked softly.

“He’s home safely. You can stop now, princess.”

And she stopped singing.


End file.
